Writing a New Article

Posts are entries that display in reverse order on your home page. Posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site’s RSS feed.

To write a post:

  1. Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
  2. Click the ‘Articles’ tab.
  3. Click the ‘Add New’ sub-tab.
  4. Start filling in the blanks: enter your article title in the upper field, & enter your article body content in the main post editing box below it.
  5. As needed, select a category, add tags, and make other selections from the sections below the post. (Each of these sections is explained below.)
  6. When you are ready, click Publish or Set a Future Date for Publish. (save as a draft if you’re still working on it)

Descriptions of Article Fields

Title/Headline Box
The title of your post. You can use any phrases, words or characters. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens/dashes and other typical symbols in the article like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”. WordPress will then clean it up to generate a user-friendly and URL-valid name of the post (also called the “post slug”) to compose the permalink for the post.
Body Copy Box
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 Text view to compose your posts. For more on the Text view, see the section below, Visual Versus Text View.

Byline

If you’re using our PDF extraction option, your author names & other important will be here. Displayed beneath the article headline.

Subheading

This content shows under the article headline & byline.

Preview button
Allows you to view the post before officially publishing it.
Publish box 
Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Published, Pending Review and Draft. A Published status means the post has been published live 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 post has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update post or “Publish” button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all posts organized by status by going to Administration Panels > Articles > Edit). To schedule a post 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 posts. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.
Publish box 
Visibility – This determines how your post appears to the world. Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site.
Edition
Entered in the YYYY-MM-DD format for your normal edition or a name for special sections.  Will automatically create a page that you can set in the customizer panel as your most recent edition, if you want to limit the front page to only a specific edition’s articles. Learn more about setting the front page.
Save 
Allows you to save your post as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Posts – Edit in the menu bar, then select your post from the list.
Publish 
Publishes your post on the site. You can edit the time when the post is published by clicking the Edit link above the “Publish” button and specifying the time you want the post to be published. By default, at the time the post is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the post within the database
Categories 
The general topic the post can be classified in.  Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category. To add a new category, click the “+Add New Category” link in this section. You can manage your categories by going to Administration Panels > Articles > Categories
Send Trackbacks 
A way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress sites, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks. No other action is necessary. For those blogs that don’t recognize pingbacks, you can send a trackback to the blog by entering the website address(es) in this box, separating each one with a space. See Trackbacks and Pingbacks for more information
Discussion 
Options to enable interactivity and notification of your posts. This section hosts two check boxes: Allow Comments on this post and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this post. If Allowing Comments is unchecked, no one can post comments to this particular post. If Allowing Pings is unchecked, no one can post pingbacks or trackbacks to this particular post.
Password Protect This Post 
To password protect a post, click Edit next to Visibility in the Publish area to the top right, then click Password Protected, click Ok, and enter a password. Then click OK. Note – Editor and Admin users can see password protected or private posts in the edit view without knowing the password.
Post Author 
A list of all users who have publishing ability, you can select from to attribute as the post author. This section only shows if you have multiple users with authoring rights on your site. To view your list of users, see Users tab on the far right.  This is the name that will show on the front page article widgest if you choose to show the author name.