Pages

As you know from Martha Burtis's workshop and from the First Steps with WordPress tutorial, you can put written content on your WordPress site as either a Post or a Page. Typical blog entries would be Posts in WP, and by default, they appear in reverse chronological order.

In contrast to Posts, Pages are for static information—they live outside the traditional blog chronology and are often used to present information about yourself and/or your site, as well as content of a permanent nature. You can use Pages to organize and manage the structure of your website and its content.

For COPLACDigital, you and your students will be using pages on your project sites, and to a lesser extent on your course sites. For project sites, the pages will showcase students' research and analysis and contextualize the project. For course sites, you and your students could each have an "About" page that introduces the project and person.

Pages and Posts share some similarities: they both have titles and content, and your theme will keep a consistent aesthetic look throughout your site. However, Pages have several key distinctions that differentiate them from Posts:

• As mentioned above, Pages are for content that is static, or not time-sensitive.
• Pages can be organized into parent pages and subpages. This hierarchy is how you can use Pages to organize and structure your site.
• You can make a WP website using only Pages (which is what you and your students' COPLACDigital project sites should do).
• Pages can use different templates for displaying content (Left Sidebar, Right Sidebar, and Full Width [no sidebar] are a few of the most common Page template options). The Page template options available to you will depend on your theme.
• Pages cannot be assigned to a Category (only Posts use Categories), and they are not included in a site's feed.

Now that you know a bit more about Pages, let's get some practice using them and organizing your site.

One of the most important things to consider when building a website (especially a professional, grant-funded one such as the one[s] you'll be creating) is its structure—how do you want your site's content to be organized? How do you want your visitors to access your content—what content do you want them to go through to get to a certain place?

For example, we've structured the main COPLACDigital site to be split into two primary areas of content: Courses and Resources. Then we have some traditional "other" content such as the home page, an About page, and FAQ. If a visitor came to our site and found this tutorial (assuming it was someone unfamiliar with the project and not using a search engine), they would have gone through Resources and WordPress Tutorials to get here. And that's exactly the way we would want a random visitor to find this tutorial—it is a logical, organized way to proceed through the content of our site.

The hierarchical nature of WordPress Pages, using parent pages and subpages, allowed us to create this structure for the COPLACDigital site. Resources is the parent page of WordPress Tutorials, which is the parent page for this tutorial. Let's try to begin putting this structure of parent and subpages in place for one of your sites.

1. Think about what makes sense for your COPLACDigital site and come up with a couple primary areas of content—these will be your parent pages.
2. Come up with at least one sub-topic that fits within the scope of content for each of your parent pages.

Once you've come up with the items for the above steps, log in to your site's dashboard if you aren't already. From the main administration menu, choose "Pages" and click "Add New."

For the title of this Page, enter one of the primary content areas that you came up with. Luckily, to make this Page a parent page, we don't have to do anything! New pages are, by default, set as parent pages unless you change the page attributes. Even though we aren't changing anything here, look to the right side of your Pages screen and find the Page Attributes section. This is where you'll go to designate and/or change a Page's parent page. It should look like the image here.

Add written content to this parent page if you want to, even if it's just some placeholder text until you can more fully fill it out. Then hit "Publish." Voila! You now have a parent page.

Now let's add a subpage to give your site some structure. Go to "Pages > Add New" again. For the title of this page, choose the sub-topic you identified that fits within the content of the parent page we just created. Since this is a subpage, we will be changing the Page Attributes. Find the Page Attributes and click on the dropdown menu below "Parent." Choose the name of the parent page that we just created a few minutes ago.

Once you've chosen the appropriate parent page, you may notice the Permalink change that's under the Page title. (If it doesn't change, that's okay—sometimes it doesn't happen until after you save a draft or publish the subpage.) The permalink reflects how you've structured the pages and thus, the organization of your site.

Add written content to this subtopic Page and publish it. Go through the same process for your other primary content area and the sub-topic associated with it.

Congratulations—you've added structure to your site's content!

Optional: Add these parent pages to your site's navigation menu. Can't remember how to do that? Check out Step 4 of the First Steps with WordPress tutorial.

Another thing to consider when you're creating a Page is what template you want to use for it. Templates are controlled by your site's theme and generally just dictate where the very basic elements of a Page will display. If your theme has Page templates available, they will show up in the Page Attributes section, underneath where you choose a parent page.

For example, the Twenty Sixteen theme doesn't have any page templates available, but OnePress (the theme for coplacdigital.org) has four: Default (a right sidebar in the case of OnePress), Frontpage, Full Width, and Left Sidebar.

Some of the most common templates (other than "Default") are the ones listed above. Here's what they mean in the most basic of terms:

	Default: The Page's authored content displays beginning on the left side of the screen, while the sidebar displays on the right side. Keep in mind, this is just what "Default" means for the OnePress theme. In general, this layout is a very standard one across the web.
	Frontpage: For OnePress, using the "Frontpage" template means that particular page is the home, or front, page of the site. In this case, only one page can use the Frontpage template, but this is not necessarily the case for other themes.
	Full Width: The Page's authored content spans as much of the designated content area as possible (governed by the theme and the device on which you are viewing the Page). No sidebars display on either side. Generally, this layout would be best if you really want visitors to focus on the authored content of the page and not be distracted by widgets in the sidebar. That being said, keep in mind that sidebars often contain crucial widgets such as search boxes and additional navigation options.
	Left Sidebar: The sidebar displays on the left side of the screen, followed by the Page's authored content displaying on the right side of the screen. In general, this layout is a very standard one across the web.

Other themes that are even more sophisticated and customizable, such as Parabola, have even more template options.

The best way to see how each of the Page templates look for your theme is to experiment with them! From your dashboard, go to the main Pages administration screen by clicking on "Pages" from the main menu. Choose one of your site's Pages (perhaps "About") to edit and go to the Page Attributes section. Choose a different template than what it's currently set on (if your theme has other templates available—if not, think about changing your theme to experiment!) and then see how it looks. You can choose the gray "Preview Changes" button near the top right-hand corner of the editing screen to see what the change will look like.

The Bottom Line

So, what is the likelihood that you will need to use different templates as you create your sites? Well, it depends on the content that you're putting on each Page. On the COPLACDigital site, for example, we have used only the Frontpage template for the home page and the Default template for everything else. We considered using the Full Width template for the COPLACDigital Handbook, but ultimately we decided that having a search box and extra navigation links were more important than a full-width content display.

As with site building in general, templates should not be used in a haphazard way, especially if using them in such a way creates inconsistencies across your site that detract from your content. Templates should be chosen with careful consideration as to the authored content on the Page and the purpose of that content. (If you decide not to make use of Page templates, that's perfectly okay! Just know that they are available to you, depending on your theme.)

Understanding the purpose of Pages and how to use them to structure your site are the most important parts of this tutorial—everything else is pretty standard, but we'll quickly review other aspects of creating and maintaining Pages.

Authoring Content

This tutorial was created in versions of WordPress using the Classic Editor. WordPress has since upgraded to a new, block-based visual editor. You can return to the Classic Editor shown in these tutorials by activating the "Classic Editor" plugin. For more on how to use the new WordPress Editor, see UMW's Gutenberg Editor Walkthrough.

When you're writing content for your Page, WordPress automatically has you working in the "Visual" text editor—this mode will be the easiest for you to work in. You'll see familiar menu items to help you format the text on your Page. For even more formatting options, toggle the toolbar by choosing the right-most button that looks like a keyboard.

Once you've finished adding content to your Page, go ahead and hit the blue "Publish" button on the right-hand side of your screen. (If you want to see what it looks like first without officially publishing the Page, you can click the "Preview" button that is on the right-hand side just above the "Publish" button.) You can also save a draft by choosing the gray "Save Draft" button if you aren't ready to publish yet.

When you've saved, published, or updated your Page, you'll see a banner notification at the top of your Page screen that looks something like this (depending on which of those 3 actions you did):

From here, you can view the Page that you just published or updated, or you can preview the draft that you saved.

Editing a Page

After you've published a Page or saved a draft of it, you'll probably find yourself going back to edit some of its contents. Editing a Page is almost exactly like creating one—from your site's dashboard, choose "Pages" from the main menu to be taken to the screen where all of your Pages are listed. From there, you can choose the Page you want to edit by either clicking directly on the title, or you can hover over the title and then choose the "Edit" option that appears below it. Either way, you'll be taken to the same editing screen that pops you back to the same content creator as when you create something new (except all of your content is there!).

The "Quick Edit" Option: If you find yourself needing to edit a setting of the Page or other small aspect (not written content), there's a "Quick Edit" option. If you're at the main Pages administration screen where all of your Pages are listed, hover over the title of a Page and notice the "Quick Edit" option.

Click "Quick Edit" to see what settings it allows you to change without going into the full-fledged editing mode. As you can see, you can quickly make changes here to the Page Attributes and settings, including the Page's:

• Title
• Slug (the piece of the URL that the Page dictates)
• Publish date
• Author (if there's more than one user with authoring privileges on your site)
• Privacy (you can password-protect the Page or make it private so that only site admins can see it)
• Parent page
• Template (if your theme has them)
• Status (Published, Pending Review, Draft)

Depending on what plugins you have activated, you may see additional options in the Quick Edit menu as well.

Changing the Page's Permalink

By default, WordPress uses the title of your Page (without special characters) as its slug in the Page's permalink. For many pages, such as "About," this will make sense, but you may find yourself wanting to shorten the slug for more manageable URLs or needing to change it if you've altered the title of your Page. You can change the slug (and thus the permalink) either in Quick Edit or in the full-fledged Edit mode for your Page.

Keep in mind that if you update the permalink for a Page, it will not necessarily update all of the instances of links to that Page on your site. If that Page is included in your navigation menu(s), that link will automatically update. However, if you've added a link to that Page within the body of another Page's or Post's content, it will NOT update there. You will have to manually update that hyperlink yourself.

And now you know all there is to know about WordPress Pages!