In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to add a post in WordPress and how to create a page in WordPress. I’ll explain the difference between posts and pages and will also explain featured images, trackbacks, pingbacks, and more.
This video is taken from my course A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress. You can watch the entire course for free here on Envato Tuts+.
If you need a primer on WordPress, check out my What Is WordPress video tutorial.
WordPress makes it easy to get started building your own website or blog, but there are a few terms and techniques that you’ll need to understand first.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn about adding and editing posts and pages. These are the two main types of content in WordPress. I’ll explain the difference between the two.
Posts and Pages: What’s the Difference?
In WordPress, there are four different types of content:
- posts
- comments
- users
- links
You might notice that pages are not on this list! Actually, pages are just a kind of post. And posts are the basic way of showing content on your blog or website.
The easiest way to understand the ways that posts and pages are alike and different is to see them in action. To see the difference between posts and pages in WordPress, I’ll demonstrate what each one looks like on a WordPress website.
Example of a WordPress Post
This Hello world! example is a post. It has a title, and it has metadata such as the author, published date, and number of comments. Below that is the content of the post. And of course, you can attach comments to a post.
Example of a WordPress Page
Pages are similar to posts, except they don’t have any metadata displayed. And usually, they don’t have comments.
Post or Page?
In deciding whether to use a post or a page, consider that both are just containers for specific pieces of information.
If you have in mind a regular website, you’ll have posts in a blog. Then you’ll have the website pages such as the homepage, about page, contact page, and portfolio page.
These are all individual pages. They represent different types of content. The difference between the pages and the posts is that the pages don’t have comments.
Pages do not display the metadata, such as the author, publish date and so on, because it’s not necessary.
Ultimately, WordPress has four content types: posts, users, comments, and links. Now that you know the difference, I’ll show you how you can manage posts and pages.
Managing Posts From the WordPress Admin Panel
From the back end, I’ll start by showing you posts.
On the left-hand side, under the Posts category, you may access sub-features such as Add New post or opening Categories and Tags.
On the right, in the main area, there’s a list of posts that have been created. In this example, we just have the one so far.
The title of the post is Hello world! Hovering the mouse cursor over the title reveals a contextual menu of quick actions such as Edit, Quick Edit, Trash, and View, the last of which opens the front-end of the site to display the current post.
Clicking the Edit option opens a WordPress editor called Gutenberg. I’ll cover that in another tutorial. Essentially, it’s an editor that permits the editing of the post (or page) content.
Adding a New Post
Adding a new post is achieved quickly by clicking the Add New button at the top, or the Add New option in the menu on the left-hand side. Returning to the dashboard, there’s an option to add a Quick Draft, and that creates a new post.
Create a new post, and then click Save Draft.
Go to Posts, and you’ll see that the draft you just created has the status of Draft. This means it’s saved in the database, but it’s not yet published.
Publishing a New Post
Returning to the front end, you’ll see that the only post showing is Hello world!
If you want to publish the new draft, return to the back-end and open it in the editor. Here you may preview or publish. Previewing the post opens it in a new window, or alternatively, you may publish it immediately.
When a post is published, there’s an option to change the visibility—that is to say who will actually be able to see the post. You may also choose to schedule a post for publication on a certain date and time. Or you can add tags to it.
Once you press Publish, the post is live.
Returning to the front-end, the draft has been published as a post. If at some point you decide to un-publish it, return to All Posts in the admin panel, and change the status back to Draft.
Deleting a Post
If you wish to delete a post, click Trash, and it’s moved to the trash.
Be aware that this doesn’t delete a post immediately. Instead, it sends it to the Trash, where it may still be accessed or restored.
After 30 days in the trash, the post is purged and can no longer be accessed. You may, of course, choose to delete it permanently sooner than this.
Organizing Posts With Categories
Open up Categories, in the menu, and you’ll see the existing categories in this table. You may also create new categories here.
Perhaps you have a blog that covers several different topics. Using categories to filter content not only makes the administration of the site easier, but it also helps website visitors find the content in which they are interested.
For example, a website may talk about food or travelling the world. The categories might then be Restaurants, Food, Travelling, Hotels, and so on.
Clicking a category name shows all the posts that have been given that category.
Organizing Posts With Tags
Tags are similar to Categories.
If you add a few, ensure you also add descriptions to them. Create three tags, for example, and then go back to the posts. On the right, under Tags, start typing and it’ll find the tag for you.
Return to the post, in the back-end, in order to choose categories and tags.
Viewing the updates on the website, you’ll see that the category and the tags are also displayed here on the post under the metadata: author, publish date, category, tags, and comments.
That’s how you publish a post and edit it by adding categories and tags.
Making a Post Sticky
When publishing a post, there are a couple more options of which you need to be aware. You’ll find all of these options on the right-hand sidebar.
First, you can make a post sticky.
You may pin it to the top of the blog, regardless of the publish date. Even if it was published two years ago and there are still more recent posts, it’ll always be displayed at the top.
You may edit the permalink, which changes the post’s URL—how the post appears in the address bar of a browser.
Featured Images
Posts can also display featured images.
A featured image is an image that is displayed on the website post and is usually before or after the title. It really depends on the theme that you’re using.
Post Excerpts
On any post, you may also define an excerpt. An excerpt is an optional piece of text that is displayed as a preview to the post, as highlighted in blue in the image above.
The excerpt feature is particularly useful in any list of posts. Instead of showing the entire contents of each and every post, it’ll show just a small portion of it: the excerpt.
Discussion
Under Discussion, there are the options to allow comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks. These are just mechanisms for linking to other pages on the worldwide web.
Pages
This is a sample page provided by WordPress by default. You may put any kind of content that you want in here. In fact, any content that works in a post works in a page.
How to Add Pages in WordPress
Pages are actually very similar to posts, except that they don’t have categories, and they don’t have tags. Pages don’t appear in category pages and archives as posts do; instead, they have a specific URL, and users go to them directly via links or navigation menus.
I’ve shown you how to add a post, and the process is similar for adding a page in WordPress. In terms of publishing, you have pretty much the same options as posts, except for the sticky part. You cannot make a page sticky because that doesn’t make sense—they don’t appear in lists, so they don’t need to be stuck to the top of anything.
Pages are their own thing. They don’t belong to a category, as posts do, and there isn’t an archive of pages.
You can, however, add a featured image to a page.
Under Discussion, you can choose whether or not to allow comments, but this is disabled by default. With that said, if you want, you can allow comments on pages, although it’s not a very common practice.
You may change the order of the pages, and it’s simple to add a new page. The process of creating pages is basically the same as for creating posts.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, I showed you how to create pages and posts and demonstrated their functionality.
The editor, Gutenberg, is a brilliant piece of software that I’ll explore in more detail in another tutorial.
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