Wordpress Basics: login + adding and editing posts and pages

Here are the basics to login and content creation in Wordpress, current as of version 2.7.1:

In your web browser, visit http://www.[your sitename here]/wp-admin (for example: http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin )

You should see a screen like this:

Type your username and password, then click the Log In button.

Now you will be at the Wordpress Dashboard. Here, you can see some of your site statistics and recent information at a glance. For editing and adding information, look at the sidebar, as shown here:

In the sidebar, everything is divided into three main sections: the Dashboard (top, dashboard only), the content creation section (middle, contains Posts, Media, Links, Pages and Comments) and the administration section (bottom, contains Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings). For adding and editing content, you will only be using the middle content creation section.

For today, we will mainly be dealing with the Posts and the Pages headers. Each header can be expanded into individual pages. For example, under the Posts header, there are Edit, Add New, Tags and Comments pages. Under the Pages header, there are Edit and Add New pages.

You should use Pages and Posts for different activities. Pages are for more permanent content, such as your site About page, Contact page and Home page (if you have one). Posts are for more often updated content, such as news items or freqently updated information.

To add a new Post, go to the Add New page under the Posts header. To add a new Page, go to the Add New page under the Pages header. Both will take you to a content editor you can use to publish to your site. You will enter the Page or Post title at the top and the content in the main center text box. Choose whether to allow comments and trackbacks (links from other blogs or websites) near the bottom of the page under the “Discussion” header, then add a Category (if this is a Post, Pages do not have categories) on the right. When you are finished, click the Publish button on the upper right.

To edit an existing Post or Page, visit the Edit page under the Posts or Pages header. You will see a list of your current Posts or Pages. Click on a Post or Page to bring you to the content editor, just as if you were adding a new Post or Page, except now you are editing an existing one. Make any edits you need, then click the “Update Post” (or Update Page) button on the upper right, in the same spot the Publish button would be when adding new content.

To add a picture, click the first icon just to the right of “Upload/Insert” below the title box in the content editor – see the photo to the right:

There are other buttons for adding other content, but we will cover only Photos for today. Once you clicked the Photo button, a box will come up prompting you to upload the photo. Once the photo is uploaded, you can choose the title, caption (optional), link (optional), justification, and size. When all of those are set, click “Insert into Post” (or Page). Once it is on your page, you can click and hold to drag and reposition it as neccessary.