Nonprofit WordPress

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A Free Manual for Nonprofits

  • About
  • Search
  • WordPress Basics
    • What is WordPress?
    • Creating Content
  • Types of Content
    • Pages
    • Posts
    • Media Items
  • Content Management Basics
    • Write for the Web
    • The Perils of Poor Formatting
    • Help People with Disabilities
    • Linking to External Sites
    • Linking Within Your Site
    • Adding Images
    • Adding Documents
    • Adding Videos
  • Content Management Mastery
    • Editor Tips and Tricks
    • Linking to Email Addresses
    • Linking Within a Page
    • Redirecting Links
  • Administering Your Site
    • The Admin Bar
    • Managing Users
    • Managing Menus
    • Backing Up the Site
    • Updating Your Software

Editor Tips and Tricks

When you manage a WordPress site, you spend a lot of time on the post/page editing screen.

Here are a few tips to help you get the most of your time there.

Toolbar toggle, aka “The Kitchen Sink”

By default the editor toolbar shows only the first row of the available tools. You can show the second row by clicking the rightmost button, Toolbar Toggle:page editor - toggle toolbar

Copy/pasting from Word

…or from a PDF, or another website, or anyplace else with formatted text.

Normally when you copy formatted text from elsewhere and paste it into WordPress, the editor handles it gracefully, saving you the trouble of manually re-applying all that formatting.

But sometimes when you paste formatted text, things get weird. Maybe the formatting looks wrong, or maybe unwanted formatting keeps carrying forward from pasted text into new text that you type.

If pasting formatted text causes problems, delete the text and paste it in again—but first, switch the editor into Paste as Text mode by clicking this button:
page editor - paste as text button

Once you do this WordPress will paste just the words from your content source, leaving the formatting behind.

Resetting formatting

Sometimes, whether you pasted text from elsewhere or not, the formatting of your text gets weird.

If something strange is happening and you want to start again with simpler formatting, you have a couple of good options.

  1. If the formatting problem has to do with header-type formatting, you may be able to fix it by selecting the text in question and resetting it to the default Paragraph format. Be sure to select the entire line or block of text before reverting the format to Paragraph:
    page editor - revert to paragraph format
  2. In any situation you can strip all formatting from a block of text by selecting it and clicking the Clear Formatting button:
    page editor - clear formatting button

The “More” tag

Pages sometimes show a list of information items going back through time.

Rather than showing entire posts in such a list, it’s often appropriate to show an excerpt—for example, the first few lines of the post—followed by a “Read More” or “Continue Reading” link.

Not every theme or content type supports this. But for those that do, you can indicate where to stop the excerpt by adding a Read More Tag:
page editor - read more button

Visual vs. Text editor modes

When editing a page, in the upper right corner of the content editing area you’ll see a small tab that lets you switch between the Visual editor and the Text editor:

page editor - visual and text tabs

Normally you’ll want to use the Visual Editor, which is a “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor. This means you can just click a button to bold some text, for example, rather than fiddling around with arcane HTML codes.

But occasionally someone will need to look at the code behind the content, either to change it or to troubleshoot it. Clicking the Text tab is the way to do this.

In Text mode, your content will look something like this:
page editor - example of a page in text mode

If someone accidentally switches to Text mode, that can be disorienting. Text mode will remain in effect for the current user’s account—not only for the current page but for all other editing sessions until you switch it back. Just click Visual to switch back to the default editor.

 

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Creative Commons License
Nonprofit WordPress by Andrew Giesler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://nonprofitwordpress.info.