Creating a page with the Guttenberg Editor

Creating a page with the Classic Editor block

Show notes: Creating a Page using the “classic editor”

Click  Pages > Add New

First – give your page a title, keep it brief.

Note the page permalink above its title. You can change this after you “publish”. Might be an SEO opportunity.

Second – click on the “+”, search for “classic”. Choose the classic block.

Paste in or type your text. Add bold, italics, links etc, whatever you need.

Third – SAVE! ie. click the “publish” button, top right.

Optional: add a featured image.

But wait… don’t forget to add it to your main menu. (Appearance > Menu)

What is the difference between a page or a post?

Most often you will need to change text on a Page or a Post on your site. Easily confused, a Page and a Post are used for different purposes:

A Page is a static section of your site that may not change often and forms the basis of your site. Examples include: Homepage, About, Services, Products, Contact, etc.

A Post is where you would add your blog or news articles. These are separated into categories and listed in chronological order. Posts age or deprecate and drop down the blog menu system over time.

Changes to you pages are easily achieved.

1. Click on “Pages” on the left , a list of pages appears.
2. Click on the page name of the page you want to edit.
3. Its content now appears in a WYSIWYG editor. Many of the tools here do exactly what they do in MS Word. See a detailed explanation here of the each of the tools. Once you have finished editing, save by clicking the large blue button on the right that says “Update”.

You can have child pages of parent pages, in other words you place a page under another page on the menu. The parent page defines the subject, while the child pages break the subject out into separate pages. You have to be careful not to create too many short child pages as this will create too much clicking around for the  user.

Also, more complicated menus can now be built under Appearance> Menus. In this drag and drop interface you can build multi-tiered menus, easily incorporate blog menus in your main menu and add links to other resources not on your site.

Ordering Your Pages

By ordering your pages you control the order that your pages appear in the frontend navigation and the order of the pages in the backend. There are two ways to order your pages:

1. Click on Pages on the left, then hover over a page title to see “Quick Edit“, click this to open the quick edit panel. You will see each page can be assigned an order. I tend to order pages 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, etc so that I can fit pages in between if I create a page later and need to fit it in between two existing pages. I usually give the Homepage the order “0”.
   Page order can also be controlled on the right of the WYSIWYG editor in a panel called “Attributes”…. whether using the Quick Edit or the Editor, save your page order with the blue “Update” button on the right.
2. Of course, this system is supplanted by any menu you create under Appearance> Menus. Use the Menus option when you have a large menu that needs to link to posts as well as pages and to resources outside your site. First create a new menu and assign it e.g. as primary menu. This activates the menu and replaces the page order system. Now you are ready to assign pages on the left to the new menu on the right.

Parent & Child Pages

If you look at that horizontal navigation on this page you will see that “Editing Tools” is a child page of  “Pages and Posts”. In other words, Editing Tools is filed underneath “Pages and Posts”. To implement this, navigate to your new  page  ie. go to the WYSIWYG editor for that page. Then on the right-hand side of the screen you will see a panel that says “Attributes”. Immediately underneath that you will see a heading called “Parent”. Use the drop-down box below this heading to select the page that the new page you created needs to fit under in the menu structure. In other words, select a parent for your new page, then “Update”. The effect of this will be to file your new page underneath the page you selected from that drop-down box on your website. also, in the back end of your website if you now go to “Pages”, you will see that there is a long hyphen in front of your new child page and it is slightly indented.

Password Protecting a Page

Its is possible to password protect any page. This can be added or removed in the “Publish” on the right. If you add a password, the page content will be hidden until the password is supplied. only one password can be created per page and there is no username associated with the password. Of course you can change the password as frequently as required. People use this function to password protect semi sensitive information. Remember, if it’s very sensitive information do not put it on the web at all.

Untick Comments

Blogging is native to your WordPress content management system. In fact WordPress started life as blogging software before it morphed into a full content management system. Therefore the ability for visitors to comment and interact with pages and posts is a facility throughout the site. It’s unlikely that you will want people to make comments on your pages. You might want this on your articles or “posts”, but almost certainly not on your pages. So I would encourage you to untick the little box at the bottom of the WYSIWYG editor page that says “allow comments”. You can decide whether you want this function on a case-by-case basis when you are creating posts, but it is not very useful on pages.

Posts (or “Articles”)

Posts are identical to pages and only differ in one way…. they are filed into a category. The category menu is displayed separately from the page menu and operates a little differently. The category menu is usually placed in the left or right sidebar area. You will notice that posts age. i.e. newer posts supplant older posts by pushing them down the list. This way people can always assume your newer content is at the top of the list of articles.