Section 9: Creating and Editing Church Blog Posts and Pages
We have went over creating pages briefly while looking at how to change a page to the front page, but we definitely want to go over this in more detail.
For both Pages and Posts you go to their section in the sidebar and click “Add New”. You can work on pages and posts, save as a Draft if you are not ready to post yet, or you can go ahead and Publish.
To access Pages and Posts you have already created, just click Pages or Posts in the sidebar and it will take you to a list. You can filter these by All, Published, Drafts or just by searching in the search bar.
You can also schedule Posts to come out at a specific time in the future remaining hidden on your Blog until then. So if you wanted to have a Blog Post saying Happy New Year come out at 1am on January 1st, for example, you can simply change the date in the blog post to be at the exact time in the future when you want it to autopost.
If you have your Blog setup to autopost to your Social Media accounts when a Blog post gets Published, then that will happen automatically as well.
You have the option of choosing to edit in either “Visual” or “HTML Text” modes.
Visual lets you edit more like a Microsoft Word document mostly using the Toolbar above the editing area. You cannot add HTML code if you are using this side of the editor. It will simply show as the code, and not how you wanted that code to display content in your Post.
If you are going to embed a YouTube video for example, you will either need to find an embed tool in the WordPress editing Toolbar, or click over to the HTML Text side and add the embed code.
HTML Text still allows you to use some functions of the WordPress editing Toolbar, but when you use them it adds the code to make it work. So when you click Bold on the Visual editor, it just makes it bold. When you highlight an area of text on the HTML editor side and click to make it bold, it adds the code tags around it like this –
There are a lot of benefits to being able to use the HTML side, but if you are not comfortable with it then stick with the Visual editor.
Screen Options: When you scroll to the top of your WordPress Dashboard, click the “Screen Options” tab and you can add/remove sections to the editing area such as plugin options and you can even make it a one or two column view. You can also change the setup of the editing screen sections by dragging and dropping them into a different layout.
Some of the settings you see on the editing pages will depend on the Theme and Plugins you are using. This would include plugins like Yoast so you can add Search Engine Optimization to each Page and Post. Scroll down to the very bottom of the editor to see all of the options you have available to you.
Be sure to add your Post to a Category before you Publish. If you do not see a Category you want, you can create it at the bottom of the Category Section.