Posts

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. Posts are what we typically think of when we think about blog content—content that is regularly updated, added to, or changing, and that appears in reverse chronological order on a site.

Unlike Pages, which can contain content and give your site structure and organization, Posts are purely content. They usually have comment fields below them and are included in sites' RSS feeds.

For COPLACDigital, you and your students will be using posts on your course sites (slug.coplacdigital.org/course and slug.coplacdigital.org/student) as a way to respond to assignments, update each other on projects, and have discussions about course content and research discoveries.

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

• As mentioned above, Posts are for time-sensitive content that is regularly added to or updated.
• Posts display by default in reverse chronological order so that viewers see the most recent Post first.
• Posts can be organized using Categories and Tags (which we will explore in the next step).
• Posts usually have comment fields below them.
• Posts are included in a site's RSS feed.
• You cannot construct a website in WordPress using only Posts.
• Posts can utilize different Formats (depending on your theme) to control how content within a Post is displayed—however, using a Post Format does not change the larger layout of the site/page.

Now that you know a bit more about Posts, let's get some practice using them and understanding how they really work.

Categories and Tags allow you to organize your Posts and curate posted content on your site. They function similarly but with subtle differences, working across different levels.

Categories

Categories are broad ways of sorting your content. Categories should exist independently of each other—so, one Category should not overlap with another. Let's go analog for a moment to think about this:

Categories work like the chapters of a book: All of a book’s content is organized into chapters. Looking at the title of each chapter will give you a good idea of the topics the book covers and how it’s organized. If the book author or editor wanted to change, add, or remove any chapters, it’d be a pretty big structural change for the book.
—Best Practices For Using Categories And Tags In WordPress

To take another "analog" or real-world approach, let's think about cars. If we were to sort cars using Categories, the different makes of each car would be Categories: Honda, Toyota, Ford, Kia, etc. A car's make is a broad enough classification, and each make clearly exists independently of the other (i.e. a car that's a Toyota can't also be a Ford).

A couple Categories you and your students might use during COPLACDigital would be "Research" (for Posts related to archival and topical research) and "Technology" (for Posts related to experimenting with different digital tools and WordPress).

Tags

While Categories allow you to broadly sort your content into clearly delineated groups, Tags allow you to sort your content at a more granular level that functions across Categories. Because Tags can span multiple Categories, they can be very broad, but they can also be very specific—the variance in Tag scope is what allows the more granular sorting of content. Additionally, Tags do not necessarily need to be independent of other Tags. Back to the analog:

Tags work more like the book’s index. Indexes are a much longer list of more specific topics the book mentions. If a topic is in the index, it’s probably covered (albeit briefly, maybe) in more than one area of the book. A book’s index is usually much longer than the table of contents, and adding or removing an item doesn’t affect the structure of the book.
—Best Practices For Using Categories And Tags In WordPress

To take another real-world approach, let's go back to the cars. Tags that we might use for cars would be: four-door, all-wheel drive, hybrid, leather interior, sunroof, truck, or sedan. These "Tags" get at specific features of a car (thus providing granularity/specificity) while also helping to paint a broader picture of the car—none of these features are necessarily limited to a particular make of car (i.e. these "Tags" can span multiple "Categories").

Some general Tags you might use for your COPLACDigital course would be "Announcements" or "Updates"—you and your students will have announcements/updates related to multiple aspects of the course. Some specific tags that you might use are: TimelineJS, StoryMapJS, primary sources, or assignment 4.

Creating Categories and Tags

There are two ways you can create Categories and Tags in WordPress:

From your dashboard, hover over the "Posts" option in the left-hand menu and choose "Categories" (or "Tags"). From there you'll see the main Categories or Tags screen where you can create or edit them, as well as see how often you use them on your site.
Add as you go: In the midst of composing, publishing, or editing a Post, look to the right-hand side of your screen and see the Categories section and the Tags section. From here you can choose from existing Categories and Tags and create new ones.

You can always publish posts without Categorizing or Tagging them and then retroactively assign them to Tags and Categories, but we don't recommend this as a long-term method of organizing your Posts. It's better to at least do some basic Category and Tag assignments as you write each Post.

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

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 Post, 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 in your Post. 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 Post, 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 Post, 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 Post, you'll see a banner notification at the top of your Post screen that looks something like this (depending on which of those 3 actions you did):

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

Editing a Post

After you've published a Post or saved a draft of it, you may find yourself going back to edit some of its contents. Editing a Post is almost exactly like creating one—from your site's dashboard, choose "Posts" from the main menu to be taken to the screen where all of your Posts are listed. From there, you can choose the Post 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 Post or other small aspect (not authored content), there's a "Quick Edit" option. If you're at the main Posts administration screen where all of your Posts are listed, hover over the title of a Post 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 Post's attributes and settings, including the Post's:

• Title
• Slug (the piece of the URL that the Post dictates)
• Publish date
• Author (if there's more than one user with authoring privileges on your site)
• Privacy (you can password-protect the Post or make it private so that only site admins can see it)
• Categories
• Tags
• Comment and Ping settings (allowed or not allowed)
• Status (Published, Pending Review, Draft)

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

Post Formats

As mentioned in Step 1 of this tutorial, one of the distinguishing features of Posts in WordPress is the ability to choose different Post Formats—as long as your theme has enabled support for Post Formats. Most WordPress themes already have this support enabled.

So, what does a Post Format do? A Post Format customizes the look or presentation of a Post, which best comes into play if you have different types of content and/or media that you want to highlight. A good rule of thumb is: you should base a Post's format upon what you want your Post to feature most prominently and/or upon what your Post is primarily composed of. For a Post with a stunning image and relatively little text, the Image Format would be ideal, while a Post composed primarily of text should stay in the Standard Format.

If your theme has support for Post Formats enabled, the following are available to choose from: Standard, Aside, Image, Video, Quote, Link, Gallery, Status, Audio, and Chat. You'll find the option to pick a Format on the right-hand side of a Post editor screen:

The presentation of each of these Formats varies from theme to theme, so if you'd like to make use of them, first determine which Format best aligns with your content. Then experiment and see if you actually like the way that Format looks! Remember, you don't have to use Post Formats if you don't want to—just know that they are available to you, depending on your theme.