WordPress in an Hour or Less: The Get It Done Guide to Installing and Using WordPress (6 page)

1. In Microsoft Word, select the desired text to be copied, and choose
Edit > Copy
from the menus (or just press CTRL+C).

2. In WordPress, open the post or page for editing (from the Dashboard, use
Posts > All Posts
or
Pages > All Pages
, locate the desired post or page in the list, and click the ‘Edit’ link underneath the desired post or page).

3. Place the cursor at the location where you want to insert the copied text.

4. In the WordPress Editor Toolbar, click the ‘Paste from Word’ icon (it’s the icon containing a clipboard and a tiny letter ‘W’). When you do this, a ‘Paste from Word’ dialog box appears, as shown in the following illustration.

5.
Press CTRL+V to paste the text into this window.

6.
Click
Insert
. The text from Microsoft Word will appear within the post or page.

If you want a page (as opposed to your posts) to be the first thing that a visitor to your site sees, you must change one setting within WordPress. In the Dashboard, choose Settings > Reading, to bring up the Reading Settings screen, shown here:

You will use these settings to determine whether the first page that viewers see when they go to your site is your latest blog post, or a given page.  For our example, change the selected option to 'A Static Page' and choose Home page in the drop-down list.  And finally, click Save Changes to put the change into effect.

If you now view your site (remember, you can do so by clicking the site name in the toolbar), you will see that the home page now appears by default, as shown here.

Also, hopefully you remember the values that you were asked to enter in the Order box as you were creating these pages, such as 10 for the 'Home' page, 20 for 'About Us,' and 30 for 'Contact Us?'  I suggested these values because with most WordPress themes, the Order value controls the position of the menu choice that displays the pages. The lower the numeric value you place in the Order box (compared to the other entries), the father to the left (with horizontal menus) or the closer to the top (with vertical menus) the menu option appears. The Home page appears as the first menu option because its order value of 10 is less than the value of 20 assigned to the About Us page, or the value of 30 assigned to the Contact Us page. We could have assigned values of one, two, and three, and the menu bar would have displayed correctly.  I used values of 10, 20, and 30 to allow for possible expansion at a future time.  If at a later time I wished to add another menu choice called 'Other Books' between the 'About Us' page and the 'Contact Us' page, I could create the page and assign it an order number having any value between 21 and 29, and the menu choices would appear in my preferred order.

When you want to add a post to your site (as opposed to a page), you follow a similar process. From the Dashboard, choose
Posts > Add New
. If you are following the tutorial example, go ahead and do this now; we will add two short posts and create categories for each of these, to demonstrate how posts can be added and categorized easily within WordPress. When you choose Add New, you see the Add New Posts screen, shown here. Structurally, it bears a strong resemblance to the Add New Page screen shown earlier.

In the Title box, enter-

NextGEN Gallery

and in the text box, type the following text:

This is definitely one of the top plug-ins that you can add to your WordPress site, in my opinion.  The NextGEN Gallery plug-in provides an incredibly flexible way to upload images to your site and to display them as slide shows, or as galleries of images, in a variety of formats.

After you've entered the above text, rather than heading directly for the 'Publish' button, instead click 'Save Draft' at the right. The 'Save Draft' option lets you save a draft version of a page or post without taking the post or page live. This enables you to continue working on a post or page while keeping
it hidden from public view.

During this exercise in the tutorial, we will create categories to better arrange the posts.  While the newly created post is still visible, find the Categories box at the far right, and click the Add New Category link.  In the text box that opens, enter
-

My Favorite Plug-ins

and click OK. You will immediately see that category appear in the Categories box

As long as we are adding categories, add one more for this chapter's examples.  In the Add New Categories text box, enter
-

My Favorite Themes

and then click the 'Add New Category' button to add this category to the list.

Now that you have these categories added, turn off the check boxes for My Favorite Themes and for Uncategorized at the far right, leaving only the check box for My Favorite Plug-Ins selected.  Finally, click 'Publish', to publish the new post and assign it to the My Favorite Plug-Ins category.

Now let's add one last post, to see the results of your labors.  In the Dashboard, under posts, click 'Add New' to display the Add New Posts screen.  In the Title box, enter the following text-

Weaver II for great flexibility

then move to the text box itself, and enter the following:

The Weaver II theme is one that I can’t say enough good things about, as it provides phenomenal flexibility. It’s great for newbies and for professional web designers, and even includes built-in mobile platform device support. To check it out, go to your Themes / Install Themes tab, and do a search on the phrase, ‘Weaver II.’

After you've entered the text, turn off the check box beside the My Favorite Themes category, and click 'Publish' to publish the post.

If you use the toolbar to get back to the actual display of your site's home page, you may notice a problem: there is currently no way for viewers to see your posts.  With the steps we have used so far, every page of this site is designed to display only page content.

To solve this problem, we will change a display setting of the Home page so that it includes a sidebar that displays your posts.  At the Dashboard, click Pages > All Pages, to display the pages in your site.  With the mouse pointer held stationary over the Home page link, you will see four links underneath: Edit, Quick Edit, Trash, and View. Click the Quick Edit link, and you will see the following options appear:

The Quick Edit screen lets you change overall options and control how a page or a post behaves, without taking the time needed to load the complete page editor. One of the options you will see on this screen is for a choice of
template
that will be
used by the page. This particular theme provides three templates for use by posts or pages-- a
default template
which displays only content from the page or post, a
sidebar template,
which displays the page or post content along with a sidebar, and a
showcase template
which includes a combination of page content along with content from recent posts.

Select the Sidebar Template option from the list for the home page, and click the Update button to put the change into effect.  Now, click the site name in the toolbar, and you will see that the home page now includes a sidebar (see illustration).  Using the various links on the sidebar, your site's viewers could access any of the posts that you've added to your site.

Throughout our demonstration examples used in this book,
we’ve made use of a theme (‘Twenty-Eleven’) that just happens to support menus for pages by default, and that theme used your page names for the menu item names and placed the menu items in an order controlled by something called the Order ID setting for each page. Problem is, (1) this is sounding like far too much techno-speak for many, and (2) what if you want a different order for your menus? Perhaps you only want some pages on the menu, and not others. Maybe you would like a post category or two on the menu as well, and perhaps you want them in an order that you want to control, without looking at some obscure ‘Order ID’ setting. You can accomplish all of this with a
custom menu
, and WordPress makes adding custom menus a simple task. At the Dashboard, choose
Appearance > Menus
. This brings up the Menus screen, shown in the following figure.