This tutorial is intended to help you get started doing very simple posts in WordPress. Once you get started you may find that WordPress is quite intuitive, and you may want to take off on your own without finishing the tutorial. That is fine! You can always come back. The same applies to the remaining tutorials as well.
NOTE: Some of the screenshots are for a generic Jury website jury.mofsa.org.
Login
While it is not necessary to be logged into a WordPress website to make comments to a post, in order to create a new post you must login. Use this URL:
https://principalitiesandpowers.org/wp-admin
Use your username or email address plus password to log in.
By checking Remember Me you can be automatically logged in the next time you visit the website.
Dashboard
When you login, you will be brought to the WordPress dashboard. When your user account has Author privileges, your dashboard will be very simple. The two kinds of items you can add are posts and media items,, and there are a few other options.
Jetpack
This website has the Jetpack plugin installed, which provides a number of features, including providing the capability for visitors to subscribe to posts.
Posts
This will let you look at all posts or add a new post.
Media
This will let you manage a library of media items (such as images and PDF files) and add new media items.
Comments
This will let you view comments, and you will be able to edit comments you have made.
Profile
This will let you edit information about yourself, including setting a new password.
Tools
With Author privilege, there aren’t any tools available! Tools become available to user accounts with more privileges.
Quick Draft
When you are brought to the dashboard you will see a Quick Draft box. This will be an easy way to get started! You can just enter a title and start typing in content.
When you are done, click the Save Draft button.
Publishing Your Post
In the left side panel of the dashboard, go to Posts to see a list of the posts. There are various options, such as Mine, which will show only your posts.
It is a draft because it has not yet been published. Click on your post, and that will bring up the Gutenberg block editor. The very first time you work with the editor, a tiny 4 page Welcome to the block editor tutorial comes up. It appears to be presented only once, so I made screen captures of the pages so you can look at it if you miss it, including the final link to a detailed guide.
After you have clicked through the little tutorial, you can then proceed to publish your page by clicking the blue Publish button at the top right.
(Note: You might encounter some spurious error messages at this point. If you do, ignore them and go ahead and click Publish a second time to publish your post. It should work!)
You will then be shown some pre-publishing checks. Click the blue Publish button again. You post will now be live.
Click the blue View Post button, and you can see it live.
Editing a Post
After a post has been published, there are various ways to get back to the editor to edit it. If you are viewing the post, you can use the WordPress menu at the very top by selecting Edit Post.
As long as you are logged in, you can always get back to the editor through the dashboard via the MOFSA Jury dropdown. (“MOFSA Jury” is the title of the whole website. A different website of course will have its own title.)
Categories
When we published our first post we did not choose a category for it. It will then be published in the default category, which in our case is General. Let’s change it to a different category, Experiment. Go back to the editor to edit your post. From the right sidebar choose the category you want.
Finally, click the blue button at top right, which is now Update since the post has been published.