WordPress is best known as a blogging platform so it’s no surprise that posts are often the most used content type in WordPress. That makes the WordPress Posts Screen in the WordPress Admin pretty important. As a beginner, it’s important to learn your way around this screen so that you can get the most out of that area of the WordPress Admin. As an added bonus, everything we talk about here also applies to the Pages Screen as well as your typical Screen for managing any Custom Post Types.
What is a Post in WordPress?
In WordPress, a post is typically a time, or topic, based piece of information you want to share with your audience. You’re reading a post on my blog right now that is topic based information about WordPress posts!
WordPress will create an RSS feed for your blog of all the posts, or a group of posts, from your blog. This makes it easy for you to setup a subscription form for your readers, using any one of a variety of subscriber plugins.
Common Uses for Posts in WordPress
As I mentioned before, posts are used on most blog’s to publish time, or topic, based content. Examples of topic based posts might be WordPress tips and tricks, family, leadership, or how to create a blog. Examples of time based posts might be school updates, news or weather updates, or entertainment events.
There are almost limitless possibilities for your blog posts. If you have a message to share with the world, you can write posts about it on your blog.
Navigating the WordPress Posts Screen
For starters, navigating the Posts admin area of the WordPress admin can be difficult if you’ve never done it before so let’s start there. Go ahead and follow along in your own WordPress admin if you’d like. First – in the WordPress admin area – lets click on “Posts”, then the “All Posts” submenu. This will show us what the WordPress community refers to as the WordPress Posts Screen where we see a list of all the posts on your blog.
Every brand new WordPress blog comes with a post titled “Hello World!”. You’ll notice several pieces of information about each post, as well as a series of actions you can take on a post (by hovering over the post with your mouse). If we click the “view” action, we will be taken directly to that post on the blog. Clicking”edit” will open the post editor (more on that later). Since the “Hello World!” Post is not relevant to our blog, lets hover over it and click “trash” (you can also send multiple posts to the trash by selecting their checkboxes and selecting “move to trash” in the “bulk actions” drop down underneath your list of posts).
But where did that post go when you trashed it? Above the lists of posts you will see the words “All” and “Trash” with numbers by them. These are filters for your WordPress Posts Screen to help you stay organized and the numbers represent how many posts are in that filter. Let’s click on the “Trash” filter and hover over our “Hello World!” post. You’ll see an option to “restore”, or “delete permanently” (the same options are available in bulk actions). If we restore our post, you’ll see a filter called “Published” above the list of posts. Published posts are posts that are visible on your blog, which brings us to the last area of the WordPress Posts Screen: the Quick Edit.
How to Quick Edit a Post from the WordPress Posts Screen
Once you’ve clicked on the “All Posts” submenu, you will be looking at a list of all the posts on your blog that are not in your post trash. This includes drafts as well as published posts. Hover over the post and click “quick edit”.
Quick Edit is a convenient way to edit the following information about your post without leaving the post list:
- Post Title
- Post Slug
- Date (that the post was published. WordPress sorts your posts by this date for your readers.)
- Password (did you know that you can password protect each post with a unique password. handy if you don’t want to give everyone an account on your blog.)
- Private (instead of meddling with passwords, let WordPress handle that. Just hide the page from the public.)
- Categories
- Tags
- Allow Comments
- Allow Pings
- Status (you can save a post as a draft if you’re not done writing it yet)
- Make this post sticky (so it will always be that the top of your blog)
Conclusion
While we didn’t go into much detail on all the settings, we have covered the basics. Now you should feel more comfortable navigating around the WordPress Posts Screen in the WordPress Admin (and the Page Screen, and your typical Custom Post Type’s screen too!). You should be able to find your posts when they’ve “gone missing” now, and even be able to control a few key attributes of your posts to make your blog that much more awesome!
What tricks do you know, on the WordPress Posts Screen (or similar screens) that have really helped you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below (because, I’ve left the “Allow Comments” checkbox checked, on this post’s “Quick Edit” form.
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