I spent several hours trying to figure out how to post a YouTube video to WordPress just to find out that it’s so EASY it actually becomes difficult.  Here’s the basics:

Post just the web address that the video is at in the Visual Editor on WordPress, it does the rest of the work for you!  Check it out:

It works the same with YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler.  you can check out the post on my personal blog here: tjkimberly Star Wars Video

Or just look at this:

Putting content into WordPress is very intuitive.  You login, and navigate to the Write tab, type out what you want and press publish.  However, there are tons of options that you can use to push the limits of WordPress to your benefits.

The difference between posts and pages

A post and page are basically the same thing in WordPress.  WordPress even stores them in the same place, but they have different uses and options.

A page is:

Pages, on the other hand, are for content such as “About Me,” “Contact Me,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present information about yourself or your site that is somehow timeless — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any amount of content. (from: WordPress Pages)

A post is:

Posts are the entries that display in reverse chronological order on your home page. In contrast to pages, posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site’s RSS feed. (from: WordPress: Writing Posts)

So, you make posts for things that come up over time.  Things like news articles, things you want to talk about, business updates, etc.  Whereas, pages you would use for content that doesn’t change often.

The basics of using the editor toolbar

I suggest that you make a post or a page, and then try all of these options to see what they do.  Also, you will want to “preview” the post on your actual site, to see what these options look like when they are rendered with your style sheet.

A good example of this for me, is that some templates I have found have forgotten to add CSS elements for bolding, italics, and/or blockquotes.  It is nice to know your limitations, or at least what you will have to go in and add when you get your site going.  On this site, the original template had no size difference between different types of headers.  The h1, h2, and h3 headers were all the same size. This was severely limiting to the organization of the page, so I have updated the stylesheet.

When you go to write your posts and page content, you have many options for formatting your content.  You will notice that the buttons look a lot like your typical word editor.  The options that are shown by default (from left to right):

First Row:

Add an Image – gives you a dialog for uploading a images.  You can choose multiple files from your computer, or an individual item from a website to upload.  Once they are uploaded, you will have many options for how to show the image on your site.  If you don’t want your images to be inline with the text, but to just show the thumbnails for your images, you can use the gallery tag.

Add video – gives you a dialog for uploading a video.  Once you have the file uploaded, you get options for how you want the video to be placed in your content. This includes options like the player to use.

Add Audio – gives you a dialog for uploading audio.  Works very similar to the video player.

Add Media – gives you a dialog for uploading media. I am convinced that this is a catch-all uploader, for anything else that you would like to upload to the page.

Visual Editor Tab – Show the word editor interface with the options that are shown in the above picture.

HTML Editor Tab – Show the HTML editor interface.  On this screen, you will see all the HTML tags that the visual editor produces around your text when you use the options from above.  There are options here for editing the text, but it is limited.

Second Row:

Bold – makes text bold

Italic – makes text italic

Strikethrough – makes text have strikethroughs

• Bullets

1. Ordered List

Blockquote

Left Justify Left Justify Left Justify Left Justify

Centered Centered Centered Centered

Right Justify Right Justify Right Justify Right Justify

Link

Break a Link – removes the HTML for a link from previously linked text

Insert an image – Puts an image directly into the text, from a URL. This is much less functional from the Add an Image uploader functionality that I talked about above.

More tag – Puts a break in your page so your whole post doesn’t show on the homepage of your website.  Use this for long posts to keep your homepage from being very cluttered.

Check Spelling – Check the spelling in your post. (I should use this more…We all should)

Toggle Full Screen – Makes the visual editor go to full-screen mode, or back to normal.

Show/Hide Kitchen Sink – This will show and hide the extra options for editing.  I will discuss this in a future article called Advanced Posting In WordPress.

Next Article: More WordPress Posting Basics

The first post on your blog can be crucial to the life of the site. The reason for this is that you have an important job to do with your first post. You have to provide any search engine that has a link to your site or that gets pinged by WordPress something quality to read.

The sort of content that you need to provide in your first post can be a mission statement, statement of purpose, a paragraph about yourself, your history with the topic you will cover, and/or the reason you started the site. This sort of content will help you to focus your mission, and to give the search engine an idea of the types and frequencies of the keywords you will be using on the site.

Also, your first post will help users to put an age on your blog. If a user comes to your site and sees only one post and the title is “Hello World” and the content is “Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!”, they are going to know one of two things:

1. That you are so new to WordPress that you don’t know how to change/delete the prefilled post on your own blog. Or
2. That your site is so new that you haven’t even had a chance to change the first post. (btw, if you are getting traffic to your blog and you only have the one post on your site, you are doing something right!)

Why such a range of topics? The reason is that as a developer, I run into WordPress constantly. I have been called upon to make an entire content managed website for a newspaper using wordpress. That system gets an entire newspaper’s worth of articles every two weeks. The best part of it is, that just looking at the site, you would have no idea it is running on WordPress. It was a completely custom build without doing any more interaction with the core than just creating a quality theme.

I work with sites that are intended as casual blogs, full fledged websites, business card websites, and revenue generation sites. I personally run between 5-10 different blogs at any given time, some that are personal and some that are for clients. Included in these sites, is another WordPress blog that I have quickly built to house and support plugins for WordPress that are no longer being supported.

Please ask questions and make comments on posts. I will do my best to answer your questions. If your WordPress question can be made into a full post covering a topic, I will make sure to give you the credit you deserve for asking the question (typically this means a free link to your site at the bottom of the post).

I made this blog with the intention of being a resource for your WordPress needs and to help you make your site into the user friendly, traffic supporting, money generating site that it can be. I will try to provide quality content, examples, and information that you can use on your own blog to make it perform for you.

Do not let your blog be just a dump of information, take steps to make it give back as much or more than you put in.

Next Article: Installing WordPress to your server