How To Create New Pages In WordPress

In WordPress, you can write either posts or Pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts, in a default setup, appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Pages are for content such as “About,” “Contact,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present timeless information about yourself or your site — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any content.

In addition to the generally required “About” and “Contact” Pages, other examples of common pages include Copyright, Disclosure, Legal Information, Reprint Permissions, Company Information, and Accessibility Statement.

In general, Pages are very similar to Posts in that they both have Titles and Content and can use your WordPress Theme templates files to maintain a consistent look throughout your site. Pages, though, have several key distinctions that make them quite different from Posts.

Creating Pages

To create a new Page, log in to your WordPress installation with sufficient admin privileges to create new articles. Select the Administration > Pages > Add New option to begin writing a new Page.

The Pages Add New Screen allows you to add new Pages.

Title
The title of your page. You can use any words or phrases. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hypens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the page like “About My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid.” WordPress will clean it up for the link to the page, called the slug.

Page Editing Area
The blank box where you enter your writing, links, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the Visual or the HTML view to compose your pages.

Preview button
Allows you to view the page before officially publishing it.

Publish box
Contains buttons that control the state of your page. The main states are Published, Pending Review, and Draft. A Published status means the page has been published on your blog for all to see. Pending Review means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication. Draft means the page has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update page or Publish button, that status is applied to the page. For example, to save a page in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all pages organized by status by going to Pages > Edit). To schedule a page for publication on a future time or date, click “Edit” in the Publish area next to the words “Publish immediately”. You can also change the publish date to a date in the past to back-date pages. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the page to publish at the desired time and date.

Publish box
Visibility – This determines how your page appears to the world. Public pages will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected pages are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the page content. Private pages are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site)

Permalink
After you save your page, the Permalink below the title shows the potential URL for the page, as long as you have permalinks enabled. (To enable permalinks, go to Settings > Permalinks.) The URL is generated from your title. In previous versions of WordPress, this was referred to as the “page-slug.” The commas, quotes, apostrophes, and other non-HTML favorable characters are changed and a dash is put between each word. If your title is “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”, it will be cleaned up to be “my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid” as the title. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to “my-site-lookin-at-you-kid”.

Save
Allows you to save your page as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Pages > Edit in the menu bar, then select your page from the list.

Publish
Publishes your page on the site. You can edit the time when the page is published by clicking the Edit link above the Publish button and specifying the time you want the page to be published. By default, at the time the page is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the page within the database.

Parent
Parent page controls how deep your page hierarchy goes.

Template
Page Template to use for presenting this Page.

Order
Page order to sort the list of Pages

How To Insert And Format Images

Overview

When creating or editing a WordPress page or blog post, you can easily add images at any time using the WordPress Media Uploader tool. Here’s how to add an image, step-by-step, using the media uploader:

Step 1 – Placing your cursor

In order to add an image to your page or post, you must first insert your cursor in the place in the text where you want the image to appear. By placing your cursor within your text, you can add images inline with your content. You can also place your cursor on a blank line if you want the image to appear by itself instead.

Tip: It’s a good idea to place your cursor on the left margin of your text, even if you want the image to appear on the right. That’s because there is a special setting called Alignment that allows you to control whether the image appears on the right or the left side of the text. It even controls how text flows around the image automatically.

Step 2 – Click the Add Media button

Once you’ve placed your cursor on the line where you want your image to appear, click on the Add Media button to launch the media uploader interface, and then select the Insert Media option from the list of actions in the left side of the media uploader window.

Step 3 – Add or Select Your Image

You can add or select the image you want to add to your page or post by choosing from either of the following options in the center of the media uploader window:

Upload Files: Upload the image you want to use from your computer by dragging it into the upload area.

Media Library: Select from any previously uploaded images in the media library by clicking on the one you wish to add to your page or post.

Once you have selected or uploaded the image you want to add, You will see a checkbox next to the thumbnail confirming your selection, and see information about it displayed in the Attachment Details pane on the right hand side of the media uploader interface.

Step 4 – Attachment Details

The Attachment Details pane displays a small un-cropped thumbnail of the image, as well as important information such as the filename, date uploaded, and image dimensions in pixels.

There are also action links that allow you to Edit Image, which takes you to the Edit Image page, or to Delete Permanently to remove the image from your site.

In addition, you can edit the following media information:

Title: The title of this media.
Caption: The caption for this image. The text you enter here will be displayed below the image.
Alternate Text: Enter the Alt text for the image, e.g. “The Mona Lisa” to describe the media.
Description: A description for this particular media.

Step 5 – Attachment Display Settings

The Attachment Display Settings pane controls how the image is displayed when viewed on the site.

You have options to set how you would like the image aligned on the page (in relation to the text and margins) and what the link behavior of the image will be, In addition you can set what size image you would like to display on your page.

Image Alignment

The Alignment setting allows you to determine where you would like the image to appear in your content area and how it interacts with any text on the page. You have the following image alignment options to choose from:

Left: Aligns the image on the left hand margin, and any text that is on the page wraps (or flows) around the image to the available space on the right.
Right: Aligns the image on the right hand margin, and any text that is on the page wraps (or flows) around the image to the available space on the left.
Center: Aligns the image to the center of the page, with no text displayed around it.
None: Inserts the image in to the page with no alignment.

Image Link

The Link To settings determine the URL/web address to which the image will be linked when clicked on by a visitor to your site. You can specify the following image link settings:

Attachment Page: Links your inserted image to its WordPress media attachment page.
Media File: Links your inserted image directly to the original, full-size version of the file.
Custom URL: Allows you to set a custom link URL for your inserted image to link to when clicked.
None: This setting will remove the link completely, rendering the image “un-clickable”.

Image Size

The Size settings determine the size of the image you are adding to your site. By default WordPress creates a range of four image size for you to choose from:

Thumbnail: Displays a small thumbnail-sized version of your image on the page/post. Note, by default the Thumbnail size is a square, so some cropping of your original image may occur.
Medium: Displays a medium-sized version of your image on the page/post. This is a good size to use with Left/Right alignments, as it leaves sufficient space for legible text to either side.
Large: Displays a large-sized version of your image on the page/post. Note: WordPress will determine the width of the content column of your theme, and display the largest possible image for that space.
Full Size: Displays a full-sized version of your image on the page/post. Note: WordPress will determine the width of the content column of your theme, and display the largest possible image for that space. If your original image is larger than this column width, the full size of the image may not be displayed.

Step 6 – Inserting the image

Once you have determined your image settings, click on the blue Insert into post or Insert into page button, to add the image to your page or post. After the image uploader window closes, you will see the image in the text editor window, including a preview of the alignment of the image, if you have specified an image alignment.

At any time, you can edit the image settings by clicking on the Edit Image button in the upper left hand corner. You can remove the image from your page/post by clicking on the Remove Image button.

How To Upgrade Or Delete Plugins Automatically

Check Requirements

Whatever the reason for updating, before getting started it is best to check the current minimum requirements page first to make sure that your web host has the required versions of PHP and MySQL. (If you are not sure, then your hosting provider should be able to tell you.)

Take a Backup

The next thing to do is to take a backup of your database. All your Posts and Pages are stored in the database, so you will need to have a copy of it in case, for whatever reason, you change your mind after upgrading and need to go back. If you are not sure how to backup your database, then complete instructions can be found in the WordPress Backups section of the Codex.

Disable Plugins

The final preparation step is to disable plugins. Now, you don’t have to do this, but every now and again a plugin hasn’t been updated to work with the latest version of WordPress, and causes a problem after the upgrade. So, it’s best to try and avoid that, yes? You can easily disable your plugins by heading to the Manage Plugins page in the Dashboard, changing the “Bulk Actions” pull down menu to “Deactivate” and clicking “Apply”.

Now that you’ve checked that you’re ready to update, you’ve turned off your plugins and you’ve got your backup, it’s time to get started.

There are two methods for updating – the easiest is the Automatic Update, which will work for most people.

Automatic Update

Current versions of WordPress (2.7+) feature an Automatic Update. You can launch the automatic Update by clicking the link in the new version banner (if it’s there) or by going to the Tools -> Upgrade (or Update for version 3) menu. Once you are on the “Update WordPress” page, click the button “Update Automatically” to start the process off. You shouldn’t need to do anything else and, once it’s finished, you will be up-to-date.

For Automatic Update to work, at least two criteria must be satisfied:

(a) file ownership: all of your WordPress files must be owned by the user under which your web server executes. In other words, the owner of your WordPress files must match the user under which your web server executes. The web server user (named “apache”, “web”, “www”, “nobody”, or some such) is not necessarily the owner of your WordPress files. Typically, WordPress files are owned by the ftp user which uploaded the original files. If there is no match between the owner of your WordPress files and the user under which your web server executes, you will receive a dialog box asking for “connection information”, and you will find that no matter what you enter in that dialog box, you won’t be able to update automatically.

(b) file permissions: all of your WordPress files must be either owner writable by, or group writable by, the user under which your Apache server executes.

On shared hosts, WordPress files should specifically NOT be owned by the web server. If more then one user owns different files in the install (because of edits made by deleting and re-uploading of files via different accounts, for example), the file permissions need to be group writable (for example, 775 and 664 rather then the default 755 and 644). File permissions (in general) should be adjusted as appropriate for the server environment (the shared host RackSpace CloudSites for example recommends 700 and 600 for a single ftp user, or 770 and 660 for multiple ftp users). See the file permission section for more (some files and folders require stricter permissions).

Automatic update has been known to fail if you’re not using PHP5. If you see the message indicating that the update is downloading the zip file and then nothing else happens, it may be because you are not running PHP5. Many hosts offer both PHP4 and PHP5, and switching is usually very easy, often a simple entry in your .htaccess file. If you can’t switch to PHP5, and experience this problem, use the manual update below.

If you have customized the TwentyTwelve or TwentyEleven theme, you should not use the automatic upgrade, as it will overwrite your changes – you should use a manual update instead.

If you see a “failed update” nag message, delete the file .maintenance from your WordPress directory using FTP. This will remove the “failed update” nag message.

How To Install WordPress Plugins

This guide is another in the Inside WordPress series and will show you how to install a WordPress plugin. While this is a relatively simple task it is one of fundamental importance to WordPress and is often overlooked. As such it is a potential cause of problems to beginners, and not being able to successfully install plugins will prevent you from accessing the very large world of WordPress plugins

There are three ways of installing a WordPress plugin:

Automatically through WordPress – easiest, some server setup
Manually uploading a plugin through WordPress – medium, some server setup
Manually uploading a plugin via FTP – more complicated, no server setup

AUTOMATICALLY INSTALLING A PLUGIN

This is by far the easiest method but it does require that your server is setup in such a way as to allow modifications to the plugin directory. This is beyond the scope of this guide, but it involves giving group/other write permissions to the wp-content/plugins directory. Once setup you will be able to press on the Add New plugin menu option:

On the Install Plugin screen you can then simply enter the name of the plugin into the search field and perform the search:

The search results should then show the plugin. Clicking on install will automatically download and install the plugin onto your blog.

When finished you can then activate the plugin – everything is done and dusted!

MANUALLY INSTALLING A PLUGIN

Downloading a Plugin

WordPress plugins are usually distributed as zip files. A zip file is a special file that allows you to store and compress many files together, resulting in a single file that is small and fast to download. Downloading a plugin consists of clicking the download link from the appropriate website and allowing the browser to store the file somewhere on your computer:

Installing a downloaded plugin via WordPress

From the WordPress plugin menu click on Add New:

Instead of searching for a plugin you can directly upload your plugin zip file by clicking on Upload:

Use the browse button to select the plugin zip file that was downloaded, then click on Install Now. The plugin will be uploaded to your blog and installed. It can then be activated (see Automatically Installing a Plugin).

Installing a downloaded plugin via FTP

Once downloaded the file needs to be unzipped, a term that refers to the de-compressing and restoring to normal of a zip file. Depending what kind of computer you are using this is either a very simple stage, or one that requires additional software. Recent versions of Windows already understand zip files, as will OS X. If they don’t then you will need to download and install something like 7-Zip, Winzip, or StuffIt.

When ready, unzip the plugin:

Now you will need to upload the plugin to your site using FTP. Before you continue you should have your FTP username and password available (these are the same details provided to you by your web host) and have installed an FTP client. For Windows you can use FileZilla, for Mac OS X you can use Cyberduck. Once you have the FTP software installed you should start it and open a new connection. Enter your FTP address, followed by your username and password:

After a few moments (if the address, username, and password are correct) you will be connected to your website and will see a directory listing.

Navigate through this directory to where WordPress is installed. The exact location of this will change depending on your web host, but typically it will be inside a directory called public_html.

Now navigate through WordPress to where the plugins are located: wp-content/plugins/

Now you can upload the plugin. Be aware that you need to upload the plugin directory as well as all files. Certain unzip applications will create a surrounding directory for you, which should not be uploaded.

When uploaded you need to activate the plugin.

ACTIVATING & DEACTIVATING PLUGINS

When a plugin is installed it can be activated and deactivated quickly from the Installed Plugins menu:

You will be presented with a list of plugins. Locate your plugin and press activate or deactive. Simple!

UPGRADING A PLUGIN

When an update for a plugin is available you will see a red indicator in the plugins menu:

Clicking on this and then navigating to the Upgrade Available menu will display a list of plugins that can be updated. If this can be achieved automatically then selecting the upgrade automatically link will do this for you. If you want to manually update the plugin then you will need to follow the instructions above and re-upload the new version of the plugin. If you are using FTP then you are advised to delete the old plugin directory first – unless you have made modifications to the plugin files then all your settings and data will be retained.