Create Custom Posts

In this video, we’re gonna take a look at how to add content to your WordPress blog in the form of new posts. So there are a few ways you can add new posts to your WordPress blog.

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At the top section of your WordPress dashboard, you’ll see a drop-down menu here that allows you to add a new post –even a new page – et cetera, so if you want to add a new post, just click on the link that says “New Post.” Now, if your posts are very short, you may want to enter the content directly using the QuickPress function here. You can just enter your title, put in the content, and enter some text, and you can also upload some images or media, and you can either save draft or you can publish the WordPress post.

But this QuickPress function is mostly for very basic posts, and I’m gonna show you the way 99% of the time people enter a new post in WordPress is by clicking on the Post menu, and click on “Add New.”

On this page, which is the complete page for adding new posts, you will see the full options for publishing content on your WordPress. Here’s where you enter the title, and in this section here, in the Editor, is where you add the content. You can either look at the content through a visual mode or you can switch to HTML mode. So I’m gonna enter a sample content. So now that I’ve typed in my blog post title and also the content into this editor area, you’ll be able to see that now, the blog post title will appear in the URL as to permalinks. And you can always edit this if your title is too long but you don’t want it to appear exactly as your title in your permalinks. You can always choose to edit this and cut down on some of the redundant words, and click on “Save.”

Using the Editor, you can always select some words and choose to bold the words or even italicize the words; and, of course, you can also change the color of the font if you want by clicking on this link and then this button basically expands the Editor to show you some of the more advanced functions, and you can select the color of your font, and now I’ve changed my font to red. And at any time, I can always switch back to the HTML mode, and I can see the HTML code here. So if you’re comfortable with HTML, you may want to edit some stuff using the HTML mode; otherwise you may just want to enter everything using the Visual Editor. If you want to insert links in your content, all you need to do is highlight the portion of text that you want to link, and click on this button here that says “Insert Edit Link.”

And here, I can put in my link…alright. So always make sure that any links you use in your WordPress Editor as the http://, quotes right in front. For example, if you enter the URL just as www.blogpaycheck.com, this would result in an error; when someone clicks on the link in your content, it would go to the 404 page. So you have to make sure that the http section is always there in any external links and even in any links pointing to other pages on your blog. And if you want the links to open up in a new window, you can select that; and if you want to give it a title, which, in most cases is not necessary; and you can also select the class if you want to align this link in the center, or to the left, or any other classes that you have here. But in most cases, you probably wouldn’t need to mess around with the classes, so just click on “Insert.”

And now you can see that this text has already been hyperlinked. So I can, of course, go ahead to other parts of the article and create more hyperlinks if I want to. If I want to highlight certain parts of the text as a quotation, or perhaps maybe if I have copied a few paragraphs from someone else’s blog or website, and I want to quote that text in my article, then all I need to do is highlight the text that I want to quote and click on the blog quote button here. And you can see that my text is now indented so it will appear as slightly different from the rest of the text in my content.

And if you look at the right-hand section here, you’ll be able to see a few boxes here that you can edit. The first, of course, is to add some tags to your content, so you may want to add multiple tags separated by commas. And just click on “Add.”

So now, these tags have been added to this particular WordPress post, and if I want to remove any tag, I can just click on the X button, and that would effectively remove those tags from my blog post.

And then, of course, you can choose to add this particular blog post to a category, and by default, there’s only one category in WordPress, which is labeled as “Uncategorized.” So if you wanna add a new category, just click on “Add New Category,” and give your category a name. Select if you want to list this under the parent category or under some other category, as a child category. So I’m just gonna list it under the parent category, and click on “Add.”

And you can see here that this new category has been added, so what I wanna do next is either save this blog post, or publish it. So I can save this post as a draft by clicking on “edit” here, and save it as a draft; or if I am writing for someone else’s blog and I only have permissions as an author or as a writer, I can click on “Pending Review” so that once I click on “OK,” this new blog post will be sent to the blog owner to be reviewed.

Next, I can also control exactly who can see this blog post by clicking on their visibility, and I click on the Edit link. So I can choose to make this blog post public, which means that anyone can see it, or I can choose to add a password to it, or I can even make it private. Now, the difference is that if it’s password-protected, it will still be available to the general public, but it will prompt them for a password. If he chooses “Private,” it means that no one will be able to see it except you, the blog owner, and any other authors or editors that you have in your blog.

Here, you can also choose to stick this post to the front page. What it means is that this particular blog post will appear on top of all other posts, no matter when you’ve published this post and any other post. By default, of course, the latest post is displayed right on top. But if you check this option to stick this post to the front page, then this post will appear right on top even if there are other content or other posts published after you’ve published this post.

And one of the most important things, which is the published date – this basically allows you to control how frequently you want to publish content onto your WordPress blog. You can either choose to publish it today, or you can change the day, right? Or you can even change to a different month. For example, maybe I may want to publish this post in June, and I can even edit the year, if I want to, and the exact time. And then I click on “OK,” and now it’s changed – the word here is changed to “Scheduled for”. So on this particular date, June 09, 2009, this post will be published. But I’m just going to publish it today, and you can see the link here is changed to “Published,” and I’m gonna click on “Publish.”

So now my post has been published, but before we take a look at the post, let me just mention a few really interesting stuff that you can do with the WordPress Editor. If you mouse over this section here, your mouse would change to this arrow icon, which means that you just need to click it and drag it to enlarge the size of the WordPress Editor. Now, because by default, it’s pretty small, so if you wanna make it bigger for you to add more content, you can just click and drag. However, this only applies to this one particular blog post. So if you wanna change the size of the Editor box for good for all posts, then you would need to click on the Settings tab, and click on “Writing.” And you can see here the size of the Post box is at 10 lines currently, and this is pretty much default; so I recommend you could change it to 25 or 30 to make the box larger and that will help you to add content easily into WordPress. And there are a few other options here, which I checked by default. You probably wouldn’t need to edit any of this. So once you are done with these options, you need to scroll right to the bottom of the page and click on “Save Changes.”

So now, let’s take a look at the new blog post that you’ve just written. And this is how my blog post would look like. And these are the links that I have inserted here, and you can see the text – I’ve changed the color to red, and the title – you can click through the title to go to the individual page itself.

So that’s how you add new content and new posts into your WordPress blog.