The Menu

To browse around the admin area, you use the menu—the panel that runs down the left side of the page. It has a link to every administrative feature WordPress offers.

WordPress groups the menu commands into submenus. To see a submenu, hover over one of the menu headings (like “Posts”) and it pops open (Figure 4-2).

Figure 4-2. WordPress’s menu packs a lot of features into a small strip of web page real estate. Initially, all you see are first-level menu headings. But point to one of the items without clicking, and WordPress opens a submenu. (The exception is the Comments heading, which doesn’t have a submenu. You just click it to review comments.)

When you click a menu command, the rest of the dashboard changes to reflect the task you picked. For example, say you choose Posts→Add New. (In other words, you mouse over to the left-side menu, hover over “Posts” until its submenu appears, and then click the “Add New” command.) Now, the dashboard shows an HTML-savvy editor where you can write your post.

You can also click a menu heading directly (for example, “Posts”). If you do, you go to the first item in the corresponding submenu, as shown in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3. If you click the heading Posts, you actually go to the submenu item Posts→All Posts. And if you lose your bearings in the dashboard, just look for the bold text in the menu to find out where you are. In this example, that’s All Posts.

The Dashboard

Your starting place in the admin area is a densely packed home page called the dashboard. You can get back to this page at any time by clicking Dashboard in the menu.

If you just created a new WordPress site, you’ll see a welcome box filling the top part of the dashboard (Figure 4-4). It provides links that lead to some of the more important parts of the admin area, where you can edit settings and add new posts.

Figure 4-4. Although the links in the welcome box work perfectly well, it’s probably a better idea to get used to finding what you need using the menu. Before you continue, scroll down past the welcome box or click the Dismiss link to remove the box altogether, so you can see the rest of the home page. (If you want it back later on, use the Screen Options button described on page XX.)

The dashboard may seem like a slightly overwhelming starting point, because it’s crowded with boxes. Each one handles a separate task, as detailed in Figure 4-5. Sometimes, you’ll also see boxes with important news (for example, an announcement about an update to the WordPress software).

Figure 4-5. At the top of the dashboard, the “At a Glance” box displays your site’s vital signs—including how many posts, pages, and comments it has. To the right is a Quick Draft box that lets you create a new post in a hurry. Below that, you’ll find boxes with information about recent posts (articles you’ve written), recent comments (that other people have left in response to your posts), and links to WordPress news.

Don’t be surprised to find that your brand-new WordPress site has some content in it. WordPress starts off every new site with one blog post, one page, and one comment, all of which are dutifully recorded in the Right Now box. Once you learn to create your own posts, you’ll see how to delete these initial examples (page xx).

Administration Practice: Changing Basic Settings

Now that you understand how the admin area works, why not try out a basic task? The following steps show you how to change a few useful WordPress settings, which are worth reviewing before you start posting. And, best of all, they’ll help you get used to clicking your way through the admin menu to find what you need.

In the menu, choose Settings.

You’ll see a page of tweakable settings (Figure 4-6).

Figure 4-6. WordPress settings are arranged into several pages. When you click Settings in the menu, you go to the first page, which is Settings→General.

If you’d like, you can change some settings.

Here are some suggestions:

Site Title and Tagline

In a basic WordPress site, every page has a header section at the top. WordPress puts the site title and tagline there (Figure 4-7). The site title also shows up at the top of the browser window (or tab), and, if a visitor decides to bookmark your site, the browser uses the site title as the bookmark text. You shouldn’t change these details often, so it’s worthwhile to double-check that you’ve got a clear title and catchy tagline right now.

Timezone

This tells WordPress where you are, globally speaking. (For example, UTC-5 is the time zone for New York.) If WordPress doesn’t have the right time zone, it will give posts and comments the wrong timestamp. For example, it might tell the world that a comment you left at 8:49 PM was actually recorded at 3:49 AM. If you’re not sure what your time zone offset is, don’t worry, because WordPress provides a list of cities. Pick the city you live in, or another city in the same time zone, and WordPress sets the offset to match.

Date Format and Time Format

Ordinarily, WordPress displays the date for every post you add and the time for every comment made. These settings control how WordPress displays the date and time. For example, if you want dates to be short—like “2020/12/18” rather than “December 18, 2020”—the Date Format setting is the one to tweak.

Week Starts On

This tells WordPress what day it should consider the first day of the week in your country (typically, that’s Saturday, Sunday, or Monday). This setting changes the way WordPress groups posts into weeks and the way it displays events in calendars.

Figure 4-7. A WordPress header includes the site’s title and tagline. The exact way this information is presented depends on the theme. Here are two examplestitle (Magic Tea House) appears in a large font. The tagline, a one-sentence description (Tea Emporium and Small Concert Venue), sits underneath.

Click Save Changes to make your changes official.

WordPress takes a fraction of a second to save your changes and then shows a “Settings saved” message at the top of the page. You can now move to a different part of the admin area.

One More Task: Choosing a Starter Theme

Every WordPress site has a theme that sets its layout and visual style. As you begin to refine your site, you’ll take a closer look at themes, starting in Chapter 5. But before you even get to that point, you need to pick a good starter theme for your site.

WordPress includes a few themes with every new installation. Somewhat awkwardly, it names each theme after the year it released the theme. At the time of this writing, a WordPress installation includes the Twenty Nineteen, Twenty Seventeen, and Twenty Sixteen themes. (They didn’t get around to creating a theme in 2018.)

It’s natural to assume that the best theme is the latest one, that the older year themes are obsolete, and that later themes should replace earlier ones in new sites. However, the creators of WordPress actually take a different approach. They want each new theme showcase a current, popular style. The Twenty Seventeen theme, for example, suits a site with large, attractive photos (think restaurant). That’s because it features edge-to-edge images and a scrolling trick that makes the content float past the pictures in the background. By comparison, Twenty Nineteen is a clean, streamlined theme that’s perfect for a basic blog or a solid foundation for more ambitious customizations.

You can learn the fundamentals of WordPress using any theme. However, you’ll have an easier start using a clean and simple one like Twenty Nineteen rather than one that imposes too much of its own style. The examples in this chapter use Twenty Nineteen.

To start yourself out right, here’s how to change your site’s theme to Twenty Nineteen:

1. In the dashboard, click Appearance→Themes.

   You’ll see a small gallery of preinstalled themes. Usually, there won’t be many themes here yet, but some WordPress installers bundle in a few extra themes to start you out. It depends on your web host, but it doesn’t matter too much, because you’ll eventually want to hunt for your own perfect theme.

2. Find the box for the Twenty Nineteen theme, and hover over it (Figure 4-8).

   If you see a Customize button, your site is already using this theme and there’s nothing more to do. If you see an Activate button, you’re currently using a different theme.

3. Click Activate.

   WordPress applies this theme to your site immediately. Click your site name (near the top-left corner of the page) to view your site and see the results.

Figure 4-8. Here the Twenty Seventeen theme is currently active. You know that because it’s the first theme in the list, and the one with the Customize button underneath it.

Creating a New Post

To create a new post, follow these steps:

1. In the dashboard menu, choose Posts→Add New.

   The Add New Post page appears (Figure 4-9 and Figure 4-10). The first time you visit this page, you’ll get a popup message welcoming you to the “wonderful world of blocks.” Click the tiny X icon to close the popup.

   

   Figure 4-9. WordPress uses a relatively new editor called Gutenberg that was released with WordPress 5.0. The first time you use it, WordPress offers to explain how it works.

   

   Figure 4-10. You start writing with a blank page that looks just like a word processing program.

   Tip

   Want to start a new post in a hurry? Once you’re logged in to your site, you’ll see a thin black toolbar that stays at the top of the page, no matter where you go on your WordPress site. Click New→Post in the toolbar to go straight to the Add New Post page.

2. Start by typing a post title into the “Add title” box at the top of the page.

   A good post title clearly announces what you’re going to discuss. Often, visitors will come across your post title before getting to your post text. For example, they might see the title in a list of posts or on a search engine results page. A good title communicates your subject and entices the reader to continue on to the post. A lousy title might be cute, clever, or funny, but fail to reflect what the post is about.

   Here are some good post titles: “Angela Merkel Struggles in Recent Poll,” “Game of Thrones Is Officially Off the Rails,” and “My Attempt to Make a Chocolate-Bacon Soufflé.” And here are weaker titles for exactly the same content: “Polls, Polls, and More Polls,” “GOT Recap,” and “My Latest Kitchen Experiment.”

3. Press Enter when you’ve finished your title to move down to the content area (Figure 4-11).

   A basic blog post consists of one or more paragraphs. After each paragraph, press the Enter key (once) to start the next paragraph. WordPress automatically adds a bit of white space between paragraphs, so they don’t feel too crowded. Resist the urge to sign your name at the end, because WordPress automatically adds this information to the post.

   Technically, each paragraph you write is called a block. When you move the mouse over a block, a mini toolbar appears with more formatting choices. There’s a lot you can do to stylize your blocks, and you’ll learn all about that in Chapter 6.

   Note

   Don’t worry if you’re not yet feeling inspired. It’s exceptionally easy to delete blog posts, so you can add a simple post just for practice and then remove it later (see page xx).

   

   Figure 4-11. The minimum ingredients for any post are a descriptive title and a block of text. At the top-right are a few important buttons that let you preview a post, publish it, or save it as a draft for later.

4. Double-check your post.

   A post with typographic errors or clumsy spelling mistakes is as embarrassing as a pair of pants with a faulty elastic band. Before you inadvertently reveal yourself to the world, it’s a good idea to double-check your writing.

   Most browsers have built-in spell checkers. You’ll see red squiggly lines under your mistakes, and you can right-click misspelled words to choose the right spelling from a pop-up menu.

5. When you finish writing and editing, click the Preview button.

   Your post preview opens in a new browser tab or new browser window. It shows you a perfect rendition of what the post will look like on your site, with the current theme. However, your post isn’t live just yet. When you’ve finished looking at the preview close the tab to get back to the Add New Post page.

6. If you like what you saw in the preview, click Publish.

   WordPress shows some extra publishing options in the sidebar on the right (you’ll get more information on those a bit later in this chapter) and asks “Are you ready to publish?”

7. Click Publish again.

   A message box appears at the top of the page, confirming that your post has been published.

   Your post is now live on your site and visible to the world. Click the “View post” link to see the published post (Figure 4-12).

   If you’re not quite done but you need to take a break, click Save Draft instead of Publish. WordPress holds onto your post so you can edit and publish it later. Returning to a draft is easy—in the dashboard page (that’s Dashboard→Home), find the Recent Drafts box and click your post in the list to resume editing it. Afterward, you can continue postponing the moment of publication (click Save Draft again), you can publish it like a normal post (click Publish), or you can discard it altogether (click Move to Trash).

   

   Figure 4-12. Here’s the finished post, transplanted into the stock layout of your WordPress site. The two circled sections represent the content you contributed. WordPress has added plenty of details, like the category and date information below your post. You’ll learn to take charge of these details in this chapter and the next.

Browsing Your Posts

Adding a single post is easy. But to get a feel for what a real, thriving blog looks like, you need to add several new posts. When you do, you’ll find that WordPress arranges your posts in the traditional way: one after the other, in reverse-chronological order.

To take a look, head to the home page of your blog (Figure 4-13). To get there, just enter your WordPress site address, without any extra information tacked onto the end. Or, if you’re currently viewing a post, click your site title at the top of the page.

Figure 4-13. When you visit the home page of a blog, you start out with a reverse-chronological view that puts the most recent post first. If you don’t like to scroll, the sidebar on the right gives you several other ways to browse posts.

The number of posts you see on the home page depends on your WordPress settings. Ordinarily, you get a batch of 10 posts at a time. If you scroll to the bottom of the home page, you can click the “Older posts” link to load up the next 10. If you want to show more or fewer posts at once, choose Settings→Reading and change the “Blog pages show at most” setting to the number you want.

You don’t need to read every post in a WordPress site from newest to oldest. Instead, you can use one of the many other ways WordPress gives you to browse posts:

By most recent

The Recent Posts list lets you quickly jump to one of the five most recently created posts. It’s the first set of links in the sidebar on the right.

By month

Using the Archives list, you can see a month’s worth of posts. For example, click “June 2020” to see all the posts published that month, in reverse-chronological order. Some WordPress blogs also include a calendar for post browsing, but if you want that you’ll need to add it yourself (see page xx to learn how).

By category or tag

Later in this chapter, you’ll learn how to place your posts in categories and add descriptive tags. Once you take these steps, you’ll have another way to hunt through your content, using either the Categories list in the sidebar or the category and tag links that WordPress adds to the end of every post.

By author

If your site has posts written by more than one person, WordPress automatically adds a link with the author name at the bottom of every post. Click that link and you’ll see all the posts that person has created for this site, in reverse-chronological order (as always). You can’t use this feature just yet, but it comes in handy when you create a blog that has multiple authors, as you’ll learn to do in Chapter 11.

Using a search

To search a blog, type a keyword or two into the search box, which appears at the top right of your site, and then press Enter. WordPress searches the title and body of each post and shows you a list of matching posts.

Delayed Publishing

Sometimes, you might decide your post is ready to go, but you want to wait a little before putting it on the web. For example, you might want your post to coincide with an event or product announcement. Or maybe you want your post to appear at a certain time of day, rather than the 2:00 a.m. time you wrote it. Or maybe you simply want to add a bit of a buffer in case you get new information or have a last-minute change of heart.

In all these situations, you can choose to save your post as a draft (click Save Draft) and publish it later. That gives you complete control over when the post appears, but it also forces you to make a return trip to your computer. A different approach is to use delayed publishing, which allows you to specify a future publication time. Before that time arrives, you may return and edit your post (or even cancel it). But if you do nothing, the post will magically appear, at exactly the time you specified.

To use delayed publishing, follow these steps:

1. Before you start, make sure WordPress has the right time settings (page xx).

   If WordPress thinks you’re in a different time zone, its clock won’t match yours, and when you tell it to publish a post at a certain time, it will actually appear a few hours before or after you expect.

2. To write your post, choose Posts→Add New in the dashboard.

   Write your post in the usual way.

3. Click the Publish button.

   This shows a sidebar with publishing settings.

4. Click the “Publish immediately” section.

   A calendar pops into view (Figure 4-14).

5. Use the provided boxes to pick a future date and the exact time when the post should go live.

   At this point, the Publish button turns into a Schedule button.

   

   Figure 4-14. WordPress lets you schedule content for future publication down to the minute.

6. Click the Schedule button to commit to publishing the post.

   WordPress will wait until the time you specify, and then publish your work.

   If you decide you don’t actually want to publish the post at the time you set, you can edit the post (as described on page xx) and put the scheduled time to a very distant future date. Or you can delete the post altogether (page xx).

Editing a Post

Many people assume that posting on a blog is like sending an email message: You compose your thoughts, write your content as best you can, and then send it out to meet the world. But the truth is that you can tinker with your posts long after you publish them.

WordPress gives you two easy ways to edit a post. If you’re logged in and you’re viewing a post, an Edit Post link appears in the tiny black toolbar at the top of the page. Click that link, and WordPress takes you to the Edit Post page, which looks almost identical to the Add New Post page. In fact, the only difference is that the Publish button has been renamed “Update.” Using the Edit Post page, you can change any detail you want, from correcting a single typo to replacing the entire post. When you finish making changes, click the Update button to commit your edit.

Another way to pick a post for editing is to use the admin area. First, choose Posts→All Posts, which shows you a list of all the posts you’ve published (Figure 4-15). Find the post you want to edit, hover over it, and then click the Edit link to get to the Edit Post page, where you can make your changes.

Figure 4-15. The Posts page lists your posts in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent, and including any drafts. When you point to a post (without clicking), you see links that let you edit, delete, or view the post.

Along with the Edit link, the Posts page includes a Quick Edit link. Unlike Edit, Quick Edit keeps you on the Posts page but pops open a panel that lets you edit some of the post details. For example, you can use Quick Edit to change a post’s title, but you can’t use it to change the actual text.

Being able to edit in WordPress is a nearly essential feature. Eventually, even the best site will get something wrong. There’s no shame in opening up an old post to correct an error, clean up a typing mistake, or even scrub out a bad joke.

Deleting a Post

As you’ve just seen, you can edit anything you’ve ever written on your WordPress website, at any time, without leaving any obvious fingerprints. You can even remove posts altogether.

The trick to deleting posts is to use the Posts page (Figure 4-15). Point to the post you want to vaporize, and then click Trash. Or, on the Edit Post page, click the “Move to Trash” link that appears in the Publish box.

Trashed posts aren’t completely gone. If you discover you removed a post that you actually want, don’t panic. WordPress gives you two ways to get your post back.

If you realize your mistake immediately after you trash the post, look for the message “Item moved to Trash. Undo.” It appears in a box at the top of the Posts page. Click the Undo link, and your post returns immediately to both the Posts list and your site.

If you want to restore a slightly older trashed post, you need to dive into the Trash. Fortunately, it’s easy (and not at all messy). First, click Posts→All Posts to get to the Posts page. Then click the Trash link that appears just above the list of posts (Figure 4-16). You’ll see every post that’s currently in the trash. Find the one you want, hover over it, and then click Restore to resurrect it (or click Delete Permanently to make sure no one will find it again, ever).

Figure 4-16. Three links at the top of the list of posts let you choose what content you see: All (every published post and draft), Published (only published posts), and Trash (posts you deleted).

Creating a Sticky Post

As you know, WordPress orders posts by date on the home page, with the most recent post occupying the top spot. But you might create an important post that you want to feature at the top of the list, regardless of its date. For example, you might write up a bulletin that announces that your business is temporarily closing for renovations, or answers frequently asked questions (“No, there are no more seatings available for this Sunday’s Lobster Fest”). To keep your post at the top of the list so it can catch your readers’ eyes, you need to turn it into a sticky post.

You can designate a post as sticky when you first write it (on the Add New Post page) or when you edit it later (on the Edit Post page). Either way, you use the settings in the sidebar on the right. Here’s what to do:

1. If there’s no sidebar showing on the right, click the gear icon in the top-right corner to show it.

2. At the top of the sidebar, click Document (Figure 4-17).

3. Put a checkmark in the “Stick to the top of the blog” setting,

4. Click Publish or Update to confirm your changes.

Figure 4-17. The sidebar has two tabs: Document and Block. The Document tab has the sticky setting.

The only caveat with sticky posts is that they stay sticky forever—or until you “unstick” them. The quickest way to do that is to choose Posts→All Posts, find the sticky post in the list, and then click the Quick Edit link underneath it. Turn off the “Make this post sticky” checkbox and then click Update.

Understanding Categories

A category is a short text description that describes the topic of a group of posts. For example, the Magic Tea House uses categories like Tea (posts about teas for sale), Events (posts about concert events at the tea house), and News (posts about other developments, like renovations or updated business hours).

Categories are really just text labels, and you can pick any category names you want. For example, the categories Tea, Events, and News could just as easily have been named Teas for Sale, Concerts, and Miscellaneous, without changing the way the categories work.

In a respectable WordPress site, every post has a category. (If you don’t assign a category, WordPress automatically puts your post in a category named Uncategorized, which presents a bit of a logical paradox.) Most of the time, posts should have just one category. Putting a post in more than one category is a quick way to clutter up the structure of your site, and confuse anyone who’s browsing your posts one category at a time.

You don’t need to create all your categories at once. Instead, you can add them as needed (for example, when you create a new post that needs a new category). Of course, you’ll have an easier time organizing your site if you identify your main categories early on.

It’s up to you to decide how to categorize posts and how many categories you want. For example, the Magic Tea House site could just as easily have divided the same posts into more categories, or into different criteria, as shown in Figure 4-18.

Figure 4-18. Here are two ways to organize the same 17 posts. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but the grouping on the bottom makes it easier to promote the teas that the Magic Tea House sells. It also assumes the site will feature regular articles about teas, and that concerts are a common type of event. If that’s not the case, it’s probably not worth having separate categories named Tea Facts and Concerts.

Categorizing Posts

You can easily assign a category to a post when you first add the post. Here’s how:

1. Choose Posts→Add New to start a new post.

   Or you can start editing an existing post (page xx) and then change its category. The Add New Post and Edit Post pages work the same way, so it’s easy.

2. Look to the sidebar on the right. At the top of it, click Document.

   If you’ve accidentally closed the sidebar, click the gear icon in the top-right corner to show it.

   The Document tab has the options for adding extra information to your post. (The Block tab has options for formatting individual parts of your post.)

3. Click the Categories heading in the sidebar.

   You’ll see a list with all the categories you’ve created (Figure 4-19).

   If the category you want exists, skip to step 6.

   If your post needs a new category, one that you haven’t created yet, continue on to step 4.

   

   Figure 4-19. The Categories box has two tabs. The one you usually see, All Categories, lists all your post categories in alphabetical order. If you’ve created quite a few categories, you might find it faster to choose one from the Most Used tab, which lists the categories you use most often.

4. At the bottom of the Categories section, click Add New Category.

   This expands the Categories section so you can enter category information.

5. Enter the category name in the New Category Name box, and then click Add New Category.

   Don’t worry about the Parent Category box—you’ll learn to use that on page xx, when you create subcategories.

   Once you add your category, it appears in the Categories section of the sidebar so you can use it

6. Find the category you want to use in the list, and then turn on the checkbox next to it.

   When you add a new category, WordPress automatically turns on its checkbox, because it assumes this is the category you want to assign to your post. If it isn’t, simply turn off the checkbox and pick something else.

   You can add a post to more than one category, but it’s best not to unless you’re a pro. Doing so is likely to mask a poor choice of categories, and it makes it hard to change your categories later on.

7. Carry on editing your post.

   That’s it. When you publish your post, WordPress assigns it the category you chose (Figure 4-20). If you didn’t choose any category, WordPress automatically puts it in a category named (paradoxically) Uncategorized.

Figure 4-20. This post is in the Tea category. Click the link (the word “Tea,” under the post), and you’ll see all the posts in that category.

Using Subcategories

If you have a huge site with plenty of posts and no shortage of categories, you may find that you can organize your content better with subcategories.

The idea behind subcategories is to take a large category and split it into two or more smaller groups. However, rather than make these new categories completely separate, WordPress keeps them as subcategories of the original category, which it calls the parent category. For example, the Magic Tea House site could make Tea a parent category and create subcategories named Black Tea, Green Tea, Rooibos, and Herbal Tea.

Done right, subcategories have two potential benefits:

You can show a category tree

A category tree shows the hierarchy of your categories. In a complex site with lots of categories, most readers find that this makes it easier to browse the categories and understand how the topics you cover are related. You’ll learn how to build a category tree in just a moment.

Visitors can browse posts by subcategory or parent category

That means that people using the Magic Tea House site can see all the tea posts at once (by browsing the Tea category) or they can drill down to the subcategory of tea that interests them the most.

You can create subcategories using the Categories box—in fact, it’s just as easy as creating ordinary categories (Figure 4-21). The only requirement is that you create the parent category first. Then enter the subcategory name, pick the parent category in the Parent Category list, and then click Add New Category.

Figure 4-21. To add a post subcategory, you need to supply one extra piece of information: the parent category, which you select from a drop-down list.

WordPress displays categories hierarchically in the Categories box. That means that you’ll see your subcategories (like Green Tea) displayed underneath the parent category (Tea). However, there’s an exception—when you first add a new subcategory, WordPress puts it at the top of the list, and it stays there until you refresh the page or add a new category. Don’t let this quirk worry you; your new category is still properly attached to its parent.

Note: When you assign a post to a subcategory, make sure you pick the subcategory only, not the parent category. That means that if you want to add a post about green tea, you should turn on the checkbox next to the Green Tea box, but not the Tea box. Because Tea is the parent category, people who browse the Tea category will automatically see your Green Tea posts.

When you start adding subcategories to your site, you’ll probably be disappointed by how they appear in the Categories list, the category-browsing links that appear in the sidebar alongside your posts. The standard list of categories is a flat, one-dimensional list in alphabetical order. You can’t see the relationships between parent categories and subcategories (Figure 4-22, left).

Figure 4-22. Ordinarily, the Categories list ignores subgroups (left). But fear not: With a simple configuration change you can get a more readable tree (right).

Fortunately, it’s easy to change the standard list of categories into a tree of categories, by borrowing a theme-altering trick you’ll explore in more detail in the next chapter. Technically, the Categories list is known as a widget. Like all widgets, it can be moved, removed, and reconfigured. Here’s how:

1. On the dashboard, choose Appearance→Widgets.

   The Widgets page shows you all the individual ingredients that WordPress puts into the sidebar on your site.

2. In the Main Sidebar box, find the Categories widget.

   This is the widget that creates the list of categories that appears next to your posts.

3. Click the down-pointing arrow on the right side of the widget.

   This expands the Categories widget, so you can see its settings.

4. Turn on the checkbox in the “Show hierarchy” settings and then click Save.

   Now return to your site and admire the result (Figure 4-22, right).

Managing Categories

As you’ve seen, you can create a category whenever you need one, right from the Add New Post or Edit Post page. However, the WordPress dashboard also includes a page specifically for managing categories. To get there, choose Posts→Categories, and you’ll see a split page that lets you add to or edit your categories (Figure 4-23).

Figure 4-23. The Categories page includes a section on the left for adding new categories and a detailed list of all your categories on the right. The categories list works in much the same way as the list of posts on the Posts page. Point to a category without clicking, and you get the chance to edit or delete it.

The Categories page lets you perform a few tasks that aren’t possible from the lowly Categories box:

Delete categories you don’t use

When you take this step, WordPress reassigns any posts in the category to the default category, which is Uncategorized (unless you changed the default in the Settings→Writing page).

Edit a category

For example, you might want to take an existing category and rename it, or make it a subcategory by giving it a parent.

Enter extra category information

You already know that every category has a name and, optionally, a parent. In addition, categories have room for two pieces of information that you haven’t used yet: a slug and a description. The slug is a simplified version of the category name that appears in the web address when you use pretty permalinks (page xx). The description explains what the category is all about. Some themes display category descriptions in their category-browsing pages.

Understanding Tags

Like categories, tags are text labels that add bits of information to a post. But unlike categories, a post can (and should) have multiple tags. For that reason, the process of applying tags is less strict than the process of putting your post in the right category.

Tags are often more specific than categories. For example, if you write a review of a movie, you might use Movie Reviews as your category and the movie and director’s name as tags.

Follow these guidelines when you use tags:

Don’t over-tag

Instead, choose the best five to 10 tags for your content.

Keep your tags short and precise

Pick “Grateful Dead” over “Grateful Dead Concerts.”

Reuse your tags on different posts

Once you pick a good tag, put it to work wherever it applies. After all, tags are designed to help people find related posts. And never create a similarly named tag for the same topic. For example, if you decide to add the tag “New York Condos,” and then you use the tags “NY Condos” and “Condo Market,” you’ve created three completely separate tags that won’t share the same posts.

Consider using popular tags

If you’re trying to attract search engine traffic, you might consider using hot search keywords for your tags (page xx).

Don’t duplicate your category with a tag of the same name

That’s because WordPress treats categories and tags in a similar way, as bits of information that describe a post. Duplicating a category with a tag is just a waste of a tag.

Tagging Posts

Adding a tag to a post is even easier than assigning it to a category. When you create a post (in the Add New Post page) or edit a post (in the Edit Post page), look for the Tags section in the sidebar on the right. It appears just under the Categories section.

To add a tag, type the tag into the text box and press Enter or the comma (,) key. This adds the first tag, but you can keep typing to add as many tags as you want (Figure 4-24).

Figure 4-24. Right now, this post has three tags. Keep typing to add another. If you change your mind, you can remove a tag by clicking the FIGS/ROUND-WRONG.PNG icon that appears next to it.

When you publish a post, the byline will list the post’s category and all its tags (Figure  and Figure 4-25). You can follow these links to browse similarly tagged posts. Many blogs also use a tag cloud, a cluster of tag links, sized in proportion to how often you use them (in other words, in proportion to how many posts feature that tag). The default WordPress site layout doesn’t use a tag cloud, but you can add one easily using the Tag Cloud widget. You learn how on page xx.

Figure 4-25. The exact look of a post byline depends on your theme, but most list the categories and tags you added to a post. Here is the way the same post appears in two different themes.

As with categories, tags have their own management page, which you can see by choosing Posts→Tags. There you can add tags, remove tags, and edit the tag slugs, which appear in the web addresses when you use pretty permalinks (page xx).

Taking Charge of the List of Posts

As your site grows larger, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage everything on one page, and in a single table. To get control of your posts, you need to develop your searching and filtering skills.

First, it’s important to realize that the Posts page doesn’t list everything at once. Instead, it shows up to 20 posts at a time—to get more, you need to click the arrow buttons that show up in the bottom-right corner of the list. Or you can adjust the 20-post limit: just click the Screen Options button, change the number in the “Number of items per page” box, and then click Apply.

Changing the number of posts is one way to fit more posts into your list, but it isn’t much help if you want to home in on a specific batch of posts that might be scattered throughout your site. In this situation, WordPress has another set of tools to help you out: its filtering controls. Using the drop-down lists at the top of the table of posts (Figure 4-30), you can choose to show only posts that were made during a specific month (for example, “June 2020”) or that belong to a specific category (say, “Green Tea”).

Figure 4-26. To filter a list of posts, choose a specific month or category (or both), and then click Filter. Here, the list shows the posts in the News category.

Ordinarily, WordPress displays posts in the same reverse-chronological order that they appear on your site. But you can change that by clicking one of the column headings. Click Title to sort alphabetically by headline, or Author to sort alphabetically by writer. If you click the column heading a second time, WordPress reverses the sort order. So if you sort a list of posts by Title, clicking Title a second time shows the posts in reverse-alphabetical order. And if you sort posts by Date, so that the newest posts appear first, clicking Date again displays the posts with the oldest ones on top.

The last trick that the Posts window offers is the search box in the top-right corner, above the posts list. You can search for all the posts that have specific keywords in their titles or text. For example, to show posts that talk about veal broth, you would type in “veal broth” (using quotation marks if you want to turn both words into a single search term), and then click Search Posts.

Deleting a Group of Posts

The easiest bulk action is deleting. To send a batch of posts to the trash, follow these simple steps:

1. Choose Posts→All Posts on the dashboard.

   That takes you to the familiar All Posts page.

2. Turn on the checkbox next to each post you want to remove.

   If you have a huge collection of posts, you can use searching or filtering to home in on just the posts you want.

3. In the Bulk Actions list, choose Move to Trash.

   The Bulk Actions list appears in two places: just above the list of posts and just underneath it. That way, it’s easily accessible no matter where you are.

4. Click Apply.

   WordPress moves all the selected posts to the trash.

Editing a Group of Posts

You can also use a bulk action to make certain post changes. For example, you can add tags to your post, change the author, or simultaneously publish a group of drafts. The steps are similar but slightly more involved. Here’s what to do:

1. Choose Posts→All Posts on the dashboard.

2. Turn on the checkbox next to each post you want to edit.

   Use searching and filtering if you need it to find the right posts.

3. In the Bulk Actions list, choose Edit and then click Apply.

   WordPress opens a panel at the top of the post list with editing options (Figure 4-31).

4. Manipulate the details you want to change.

   Using the Bulk Edit panel, you can add tags (type them in) or apply a category. However, you can’t remove tags or change the category. That means that if you apply a new category, your posts will actually have two categories, which probably isn’t what you want. (Sadly, you have to remove the category you don’t want individually, post by post.)

   The Bulk Edit panel also lets you change the post’s author (if your site has more than one), its status (for example, turning a draft into a published post), and a few other settings that you’ll explore in the coming chapters.

   

   Figure 4-27. The Bulk Edit panel lists posts you’re editing en masse (in this example, there are three), and provides a limited number of editing options. Here, you’re adding a new tag to the three posts.

5. Click Update in the Bulk Edit panel.

   Or back out by clicking Cancel.

Tip

Here’s a dashboard double-trick that combines filtering and bulk actions. Say you decide to change all the posts in a category. First choose the category in the filter list (above the list of posts) and then click Filter. You’ll see a list that includes only the posts in that category. To select all these posts, turn on the checkbox that appears in the top-left corner of the post list, next to the word “Title.” Now you can pick your universal action from the Bulk Actions box and carry on.

Permalinks

Here’s the good news: You can choose the permalink style. And here’s the bad news: If you don’t change it yourself, you’ll be stuck with distinctly old-fashioned web addresses.

With the default permalink style, WordPress creates short but rather cryptic web addresses that use the post ID. They follow this structure:

http://site/?p=id

For example, if you create a WordPress blog at lazyfather.com/blog, the first “Hello world!” post gets a permalink like this:

http://lazyfather.com/blog/?p=1

The post ID is a unique, sequential number that WordPress gives to every new post. So it’s no surprise that the first post has a post ID of 1.

This permalink style is short, but it has no other benefits. The permalinks are meaningless to other people and search engines, because it’s impossible to tell what a given post is about. Can you tell the difference between http://lazyfather.com/blog/?p=13 (a post about cute family pets) and http://lazyfather.com/blog/?p=26 (a post about the coming Mayan apocalypse)? The post ID is essentially a secret code that doesn’t mean anything to anyone except the web server database that holds the collection of correspondingly numbered posts.

Even if you love the convenience of short web addresses (and who doesn’t?), you almost certainly want to use a more descriptive permalink style. Fortunately, WordPress makes it easy. Just follow these steps:

In the dashboard, choose Settings→Permalinks.

The Permalinks Setting page appears.

Choose a new permalink style.

Your choices are listed under Common Settings:

Plain

This style uses brief but obscure permalinks that feature the post ID, like http://magicteahouse.net/?p=13.

Day and name

These permalinks include several pieces of information, including the year, month, and date, separated by slashes. At the end is the much more descriptive post name (a simplified version of the post title), as in http://magicteahouse.net/2020/07/28/announcing-teas-from-kuala-lumpur.

Month and name

This style is similar to “Day and name,” except that it leaves out the date number, giving you a slightly more concise permalink, like http://magicteahouse.net/2020/07/announcing-teas-from-kuala-lumpur.

Numeric

This is a nicer looking version of the Plain style. It uses the post ID, but without including the ?p= characters. Instead, it adds the text /archives, as in http://magicteahouse.net/archives/13. However, this type of permalink is still as clear as mud.

Post name

This style omits all the date information, using just the post name, as in http://magicteahouse.net/announcing-teas-from-kuala-lumpur. The advantages of this system are that the permalinks it creates are concise and easy to remember and understand. They don’t emphasize the date the content was created, which is important if you have timeless content that you want to refer to months or years later. One disadvantage is that if you give more than one post the same name, WordPress needs to tack a number onto the end of the permalink to make it unique.

Custom structure

This is an advanced option that lets you tell WordPress exactly how it should cook up permalinks. The most common reason to use a custom structure is because you want the post category to appear in your permalink (as explained in the box on “Create Permalinks That Include the Category”).

After you’ve chosen your permalink style preference, Click Save Changes.

WordPress applies the permalink change to your entire site. That means that WordPress updates any posts you already published to the new style. If you’re switching from the standard style to another style, this never causes a problem, because the ID-based links continue to work. (That’s because no matter what permalink style you use, WordPress continues to give each post a unique post ID, which it stores in its database.) However, if you switch to a second permalink style (for example, “Day and name”) and then to a third style (say, “Month and name”), the outlook isn’t so rosy. Anyone who bookmarked a “Day and name”-style URL will find that it no longer works.

Changing a Post’s Permalink

Most WordPress fans prefer pretty permalinks—web addresses that include the post title. You get pretty permalinks in every permalink style except Default and Numeric.

However, pretty permalinks aren’t always as pretty as they should be. The problem is that a post title doesn’t necessarily fit well into a web address. Often, it’s overly long or includes special characters. In this situation, you can help WordPress out by explicitly editing the slug—the version of the post name that WordPress uses in your permalinks.

You can change the slug when you add or edit a post. Here’s how:

1. Click the post title.

   A box appears around the title. The permalinks appears at the top of this box.

   WordPress creates the slug automatically, once you type in the post title and start entering the post content. After that point, the slug doesn’t change, even if you edit the title, unless you edit it explicitly.

2. Click the Edit button next to the permalink (Figure 4-24).

   WordPress converts the portion of the permalink that holds the slug into a text box. You can then edit to your heart’s content, so long as you stay away from spaces and special characters, which aren’t allowed in URLs. The best permalinks are short, specific, and unlikely to be duplicated by other posts. (Although WordPress is smart enough to refuse to use a slug you assigned to another post.)

   Note

   If you see a Change Permalinks button next to the permalink where the Edit button should be, you don’t have pretty permalinks turned on. To fix the problem, follow the steps on page xx.

3. Click Save to make your change official.

   

   Figure 4-28. Here, you’re cutting the unwieldy slug “announcing-teas-from-kuala-lumpur” down to size.

   Note

   WordPress is very conscientious about dealing with old permalinks. If visitors try to find a post using an old permalink that has since changed, WordPress automatically forwards them to the right post and correct web address. This trick makes sure that old bookmarks and search engines that link to your site keep working.

Browsing Categories and Tags Using a Web Address

Earlier, you saw how the Categories widget lets you retrieve a list of posts for any category. For example, click the Herbal Tea link and—presto!—you see the posts about brewing your favorite dried leaves.

WordPress works this category-browsing magic using a specific form of web address. If you understand it, then you can use category web addresses yourself, wherever you need them. First, you start with the site address:

http://magicteahouse.net

Then, you add /category/ to the end of the address, like this:

http://magicteahouse.net/category/

Finally, you add the bit that identifies the category you want to use. If you use the default permalink style, you get awkward category web addresses that incorporate the category ID:

http://magicteahouse.net/category/?cat=6

But if you use pretty permalinks, life is much better. Then, instead of embedding the category ID, category web addresses use the much more readable category slug, like this:

http://magicteahouse.net/category/herbal-tea

WordPress cooks up the slug based on your category name, using the same process it follows to pick the slug for a new post. First, WordPress replaces every uppercase letter with a lowercase one. Next, it replaces spaces with hyphens (-). Lastly, it strips out forbidden special characters, if you used them. As a result, the category Herbal Tea gets the slug herbal-tea.

Remember, you can modify the slug for every category using the Categories page (Figure 4-21). For example, you can shorten the address shown above by replacing herbal-tea with the simpler slug herbal.

Tags work the same way as categories, except the /category/ portion of the web address becomes /tag/. So, to browse the posts that use a specific tag, you need an address like this:

http://magicteahouse.net/tags/kuala-lumpur

You can tweak tag slugs in the Tags page. However, it’s far less common to tailor tag slugs than it is to edit post and category slugs.