You are here: Home / Tutorials / Editing Pages and Posts

Editing Pages and Posts

Pages and posts are similar, and they have similar processes for adding, editing, and deleting.

Pages:

Posts:

  • Are essentially specialized pages, used for blog entries, news items, or other purposes
  • Are typically not included in the navigation menu
  • Can be categorized and tagged
  • Are typically used for dated material, like news and updates
  • More information: http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

Adding, Editing, and Deleting Pages and Posts

The following instructions apply to both pages and posts. For posts, use the Posts > All Posts menu instead of the Pages > All Pages menu, and the Posts > Add New menu instead of the Pages > Add New menu.

Add a Page/Post. Go to the Pages > Add New menu. This will bring up a new blank page. See the Page/Post Editor information detailed below.

Edit or Delete a Page/Post. Go to the Pages > All Pages menu. Hover your mouse over the name of the page you want to change and some links will appear. Quick Edit allows you to change some basic information about the page. Edit brings you to a screen where you can edit the page content and other details. Trash deletes the page. View opens the published version of the page.

The Page/Post Editor. When you are adding or editing a page, the center section, the Content Editor, should look and feel similar to many email and word processing programs. Important panels in the Page/Post Editor:

  • Title. The text box at the top is where you can add or edit the page title.
  • Permalink. Beneath the title is the Permalink, which is the URL for that page. It is automatically generated from the text you type in the Title. Note: if you write a title and click outside the title box, the permalink will be set. If you change the title after that, you will need to edit the permalink again. We recommend writing human-readable permalinks, i.e. words separated by hyphens (spaces are not permitted in URLs).
  • Content Editor. This is where you control the content of the page.
    • Upload/Insert Buttons. These buttons allow you to upload and insert images, video, audio, and other items into your page.
    • Visual and HTML Views. The content editor is present when editing both pages and posts. There are two views – Visual and HTML. We recommend using the Visual view, even if you are familiar with HTML.
    • Editing Buttons. There is a button in the upper right corner of the Visual Editor labeled Show/Hide Kitchen Sink (the label appears when you hover your mouse over the button). Clicking this button will toggle extra editing buttons. We recommend leaving these buttons visible. You can add and remove buttons from the Visual Editor through the TinyMCE Advanced Plugin. The settings for this plugin can be found in the Settings > TinyMCE Advanced menu. (If the menu is not there, you will need to activate the plugin. Go to the Plugins > Plugins menu and click the Activate link next to TinyMCE Advanced.)
    • Inserting Links. See the Inserting Links page for more details.
    • Inserting Images. See the Inserting Images page for more details.
    • Inserting Files (Audio, Video, PDF, etc). See the Inserting Files page for more details.
    • Tables. Note: tables are tricky to use and do not always behave as expected. We recommend avoiding the use of tables if you can. If you have the “Kitchen Sink” shown and you do not see any table buttons, you need to enable them. To do this, go to the Settings > TinyMCE Advanced menu, drag the table buttons to the editor, and save the changes. (If the menu is not there, you will need to activate the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.) The first step is to insert a new table by using the Inserts a New Table button. You can specify settings, such as the number of rows and columns. You can add and delete rows and columns later, change the properties of specific table cells and table rows, and merge/unmerge table cells.
    • The Editor Box. This large box is where you can add and edit your content. You can make this panel larger or smaller by clicking and dragging the area with diagonal lines in the lower right corner of the panel.
    • Undo. You can Undo actions by using the Ctrl-Z keyboard shortcut or using the Undo button (it looks like a curved arrow).
  • Preview, Save Draft, and Publish/Update. In the upper right corner of the window, there is a section called Publish. This is where you can save the page as a draft (visitors to your website will not be able to see it until you publish it), Preview Changes before saving, or Publish/Update it (make it visible to your visitors). You can also make the page Private (only logged in users can see it), Password Protected (visitors will be able to see it in the navigation menu, but cannot view the content without the password), and publish the page at a later date. More information: http://codex.wordpress.org/Content_Visibility

Page Order and Hierarchy (Sub-Pages)

To change your page order or appearance of your navigation, see the Navigation Menu page for more details.

If you want a page to appear inside a drop-down menu, you must edit that page. Find the Page Attributes panel in the right-hand column, and in the Parent drop-down, select the “Parent” page – the page that you want the currently edited page to appear underneath. You can have multiple levels in your page hierarchy. The visible (top-level or first-level) navigation items are typically referred to as parent pages, and their initially hidden drop-down (lower-level) navigation items are referred to as child pages.

Headings

When using headings in your website content, you should not use the “Font size” and “Select text color” drop-down buttons whenever possible. Instead, use the drop-down button labeled paragraph and select the appropriate heading level. For example, Heading 1 is usually reserved for the biggest headings, such as the first instance of the page title on each page. Note: In the Visual Editor, the headings will not look the same as on your website. You will need to use the Preview / Preview Changes button to see what the headings look like on the page.

To change the heading styles, you should change them from the Genesis > Design Settings menu (if you are using the Prose theme), the Settings > Google Fonts menu (if you have the WP Google Fonts plugin enabled), or the My Custom CSS menu (you will have to write CSS code). This method for styling heading levels is recommended because you will be able to change heading levels universally across your website. For example, if you decide you want to make all of your headings bigger by 1 pixel, you can do this from a single menu, and it would affect all pages and posts. If you styled all of your headings with the “Font size” and “Select text color” buttons, then you would have to edit every page and post manually to make the same change.

Changing the Page Name from the Page Heading

Required: Genesis Framework, Genesis Simple Hooks plugin. To remove the page name from being displayed as the default h1 (heading level 1), go to the Genesis > Simple Hooks menu, add the following code to the genesis_before Hook, and select “Execute PHP on this hook?” If the opening and closing PHP tags (<?php and ?>) are already in the box, you can just add the one line of code on its own line within the existing PHP tags.

<?php
remove_action('genesis_post_title', 'genesis_do_post_title');
?>

Tips and Tricks

Line breaks. When you hit the Enter button, you get paragraph spacing by default. This leaves extra space between lines. If you do not want this extra space, hit Shift+Enter for a normal line break.

Copying text from an email, Word, other websites, etc. If you need to copy text content from another source, you should try using the Paste from Word button in the WordPress editor. Normally, when you copy and paste text directly into the WordPress editor, WordPress will try to copy the exact styles. This can override your default styles, e.g. you could be pasting text with a font size of 14 pixels into your site, where the default body font size is 12 pixels. But if you use Paste from Word, the editor will preserve formatting such as bold, links, and heading levels without overriding your default styles. You can also use the Paste as Plain Text button, which removes all formatting and links.