In the default installation of WordPress the blog creates one post, “Hello World!”. Now, we can either delete this or edit it, but to do either, we need to find it in the back-end. Assuming you have moved on straight from our last tutorial, “Freshly Pressed WordPress“, and that you are logged into the admin end, all you need do is click on “Manage” (below the blog title and between “Write” and “Comments”).
The page will refresh and you will find that admin displays a short table with the details of the “Hello World” post. This page will be where you administer your posts and becomes a center of operations as you create more and more content.
Note: In this management area you’ll also find links for “Pages”, “Uploads” and “Categories” among others, and like posts, this is where you will administer them. If you do feel adventurous and want to go off-post, you can always return to what we are doing here later. As I said before, there is very little damage that can be done to WordPress by tinkering around.
So, click on “Edit” and the page will refresh again.
You are still in the “Posts” tab of the “Manage” section (as long as you have installed v2.1 or ‘Ella’), but the content has changed into an interface that will become very familiar. This is the post editor, the place where you’ll be spending all your creative energy, whether you are editing posts like now or writing original ones.
Edit
We’ll start with the title, “Hello World!”. Select the text and type in something less banal, more focussed on your subject matter, like “Blue is the New Black for Pandas”. While we’re at it, let’s change the post content. Put in a couple of paragraphs, maybe play with the formatting tools (use a bit of bold, or italics, or even a numbered list). When you are happy with this you can save the post by … clicking “Save” BUT if you’d like to continue editing (which we do) click — can you guess!? — “Save and Continue Editing” (these WordPress people make it so intuitive, don’t they?).
So let’s have a look at the front end for a moment (assuming you have still got it in a tab on your browser — if not, click on “View Site »”). Click refresh and … there it is, your lovely revised post!
Blue Tabs & Categories
There are a couple of things we should do before closing this session, though. The first is to look at a feature called “Categories”. Click back to the admin end and look to the right of the “Post” area. There is a blue tab with that title, and if it isn’t expanded, click on the “+”. You’ll see immediately that the post has been put into the default category “Uncategorized”. Not ideal, so let’s create a relevant category, maybe “News”. Type it into the field and click “Add”. A nice bit of Ajax later (where the yellow fades away) and we have placed your edited post in a new category. Superb! Uncheck “Uncategorized” and then “Save and Continue Editing”.
The second thing to look at are the other tabs, using the “+/-” to toggle between hidden and visible. I often use “Post Timestamp” to reorder posts on our front page or publish them at a later date, and sometimes, if I have a page for a private client or family only, I protect it with a password. Each functionality is fairly straightforward.
Let’s have a quick look at the post in your live tab. Click refresh and you’ll see that the “Uncategorized” category (!) has disappeared and has been replaced by your new category. This is one of those lovely WordPress touches which have been brought about by the development team’s extensive consultation with WordPress’s legion of users: if something ain’t used, it ain’t displayed. Not only is the application intuitive, it is also consistently sensible — let’s rename it: “SensiblePress”! Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.
Next, The Fine Art of Uploading.
