Post Options

The More I learn, the Less I Know

Post Options

When you click “Add New” in the editor, there will automatically be a title and one text area, and you just type. The result will be what you see in this paragraph and what you’ve already seen in the About The Design post. A simple text post.

From there, you have quite a few options. Every element in this post, and every element everywhere on the site, which means each paragraph, heading, divider, spacer, image, etc, is a separate “block.” You access and add blocks by a simple drop down menu at the top of the page.

The available elements include everything from block quotes to images to spacers to galleries to embedded videos to audio tracks from Spotify and other services … it’s a very comprehensive list. You can also create a paragraph element by simply hitting return and the system will create it for you so you don’t have to go back to create each paragraph as a block yourself.

Each block you create is like adding a Lego brick to a Lego wall. “Click” and you’ve expanded the wall. While this may seem counter-intuitive to someone who’s used to typing freely, it has a lot of benefits. Each element, including each paragraph, can be formatted independently and deleted or moved up and down the page with a click. When you hover over or click in the element, a menu pops up for that element. This paragraph will repeat as an image for the example.

Adding an image is a click to add the block and choosing your image.

This is a caption. Caption’s are optional, but a space is provided automatically when adding an image to your post.

Adding a gallery works the same way.

Adding anything works the same way.

Here’s A New Heading

Everything is a matter of a few seconds and some clicks.

On the right side of the editing interface, there will be a number of options for the entire post and for individual blocks. The three most commonly used features that are relevant to the site design are Categories, Featured Image, and Excerpt. I will point you to better, more advanced instruction on using this Gutenberg editor, but for right now these items speak to site functionality so they’re relevant.

Category: The category is self-explanatory. You choose the category to decide where the post will show up on the site from the menu.

Featured Image: For each post in any category, you can assign a featured image. That image is just a click to upload like any other, and it will show up in any post list as a thumbnail image for the post, such as you saw on the main page. It also shows in the title header, as you see at the top of this page. If you don’t want to find an image appropriate for each post, we can lose the thumbnail on the main page. I’ve already set the site up so an image will be selected automatically for the title header area of the post if there is no featured image assigned. The About page is an example of this, pulling the title header image at random from a small pool of four images every time the page is drawn. There is no such easy option for the thumbnails. A decision should be made for consistency. You’re either going to use featured images per post or you are not. There’s no problem with the title header, but the thumbnails in the post lists should stay or go based on this decision. I encourage you to use the featured images, but I understand that can be tedious.

Excerpt: The short summary text you see for each post in the post lists is a snippet containing the first few lines of the post. If you don’t like what’s there and don’t want to change the starting text of the post, there’s an Excerpt option that will let you replace that summary with one you compose yourself. This does not change the main post text at all. You would see the summary you typed on the post list in place of the post’s first few lines. It’s most common to let the system generate the excerpt automatically based on the post’s text, but as that’s a visual consideration in the setup I’m mentioning it.

As I said, I will point you to more complete instruction, but these are the basics of editing your posts. Once we finalize the design, I’ll give you a login so you can play around. When the domain is finally active, I’ll install a security certificate (https://) and move the login URL for safer logins and to block amateur hackers, but for now this a reasonable amount of information on what you’ll be using (along with the remaining two walk-through posts).

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