Hints and tips for using WordPress.

I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years now.  On the whole it has been pretty easy, but sometime I struggled, until I found a work around.  I’ll document some of these.

How do I find my document?

I have many blog posts and found it hard to find the one I wanted.  You can display all your posts using Posts -> All Posts.

• Use the Dates pull down, select a month, and press filter.  This shows me the documents I’ve created on in the selected month.
• Use the Categories pull down, select one, and press filter.  This shows the matching documents.  You specify the categories when you make the post.
• Tab across, enter a search argument and press the Search Posts button.

How do I find my drafts ?

On the dashboard page -> Quick draft has recent drafts and view all drafts.

Creating a post

You can use the “classic” or the “block” mode.  I prefer classic for small posts as I find it easier to use and uses less key strokes.

With a classic block you can enter headings, data, tables etc.  With block mode, you create a heading block, or a text block or a pre formatted block, or a native html block. A block may be one sentence.

How to edit the html in classic mode

If you go to the top of the document it will display two toolbars, use the “⋮” in the smaller toolbar.  Select “Edit as html”.   Go down to your text… make your changes, and select the “⋮” in the small box toolbar which appears as you move the cursor.  With big documents this gets impractical, so using block mode may be better.

You can be in block mode, but create small blocks of classic mode. I do this when I want to change attributes, for example in the style sheet example below, I could only add style=”line-height :90%; ” to the <pre… >, if I used classic mode. If you do not use classic mode, it removes the “failing” code. It gets a bit messy, but you get used to it.

Pasting text into pre formatted blocks.

You can create a pre formatted block.  This is basically data within a <pre>…</pre> set of html tags.

If you paste into a block, it removes multiple spaces, and so all your nicely formatted text comes out all wrong.  The solution is to go into html mode, find the <pre>…</pre> and paste your text.   This will retain multiple spaces.

I find the data displayed in a pre formatted block is too large.  I use

<pre><small>….  my data </small></pre> to make the text smaller, see below for an example.

Using tables

You can use the blocks mode “table” to define a table, then edit it as raw html to do tweaks, such as change the width of columns as in the following example.

<table>
  <thd>
    <th width=”30%“>header1</th>
    <th>header2</th>
  </thd>
  <tr>
    <td>data1</td>
    <td>data<2/td>
  </tr>
</table>

Using Style Sheets

Here is a link to information on CSS and style sheets.  You can search for attributes such as line-height.

I have not found a way of including a style sheet in a page.  If you edit the html you can use  inline styles for example

<span style=”color:red;”>…</span>,

or use CSS for example selectors like

• <pre class=”tls”>…</pre> with CSS class definition .tls {}
• <pre id=”special>…</pre> with CSS id definition #special{}
• <pre>…</pre> with CSS tag definition  pre {}
• or combinations <pre class=”tls”>…/pre> with CSS pre.tls {} meaning <pre> tags and class = tls.

then specify the style via WordPress home page -> Appearance-> Customize -> Additional CSS.  This means what you put in this section is available to all your posts and pages. 

I have

pre.tls, div.tls {
   line-height: 1;
   color: darkgreen;
}

This says any pre html tags with class=”tls”, or a div tag with a class=”tls” set the line height to 1, and make the color darkgreen.

My style sheet includes

/* reduce the vertical space of lists */
.compact {
   line-height: 90%;
}
/* make the summary line look link a link, by underlining it and changing
   the colour.  Also change the cursor to a hand
*/ 
details > summary {
   background-color: #ddd;
   border: none;
   text-decoration: underline;
   cursor: pointer;
}
/* Make <b> bolder within <pre class="tls" */
pre.tls b {
   font-weight: 900;
   color: black;
}

 Note: the above pre formatted text has style=”line-height : 90%” in the <pre > tag, and the <small>…</small> tags have been used.

What are my top posts?

Dashboard -> Top pages and posts.   This gives Today, Yesterday; tab across to Summaries,  Select from  7 Days| 30 Days| Quarter| Year| All Time

How to rearrange the dashboard.

You can drag and drop with widgets

The widgets within dashboard have “˄, ˅” at the top.   This moves the widget up or down. (Up means up the right hand side to the bottom of the left, then up the left hand side to the top)

• ⏶ close widget
• ⏷ open widget

What are the short cuts?

I found this document which has a good list.

Adding pictures

You can add pictures via your media. Use the Add Media icon in the toolbar (Alt shift M), select from your list, and click on “Insert” .  The are strict controls as to the types of data you can upload.