3-2: How to fix things

One of the cool things about WordPress is that it is VERY forgiving. Just about everything you can misspell or mis-post, you can edit. We do this through the “Manage” menu. But we can do so much more…

The Manage tab has four primary areas we’ll focus on:

1. Posts
2. Pages
3. Uploads
4. Categories

(We aren’t going to worry about Import and Export – that’s for moving a whole blog from one place to another.)

Manage Posts and Manage Pages are pretty much as you’d expect, but you have the ability to do more than you think. Let’s look at those blocks out to the right of your admin panel. They let you do a lot of neat things:

• Categorize your posts
• Limit/Allow Comments on a particular post
• Password-protect a particular item
• Change the “Slug” of a post
• Take a post or page “Offline” for a while
• Change the timestamp of a post. And remember, changing the timestamp might end up rearranging your entries, because Posts are displayed in chronological order.

Of course, to use these, you have to open them. Click on the “+” sign on the “Post Status” box:

(If you don’t have Java enabled on your computer, you won’t see anything happen. But if you do, the box will open up and give you some options.)

Here, you can take a post offline without deleting it, in case it needs to come back. You can do the same with Pages, by the way. If you’re running a disaster blog and there are no current open locations, you may want to take the “Locations” page down temporarily. When you want it back up, change the status to Published and you’re live again.

Let’s now look at that Categories box:

You can see I already have a few established. You can create them in the Manage/Categories menu that you see at the very top – but if you need to, you can create them on the fly. Just type whatever name you want to use in the box, and click on the “Add” button.

You can now see that I’ve added a Humor category to my blog. This brings up another point: a Post can belong to as many categories as you need. You don’t want to go hog-wild with this, but it is quite useful. On a disaster, for instance, you could have categories for each affected state, and separate the news that way. Or, you could run a chapter blog and use Categories to divide your Health and Safety and Volunteer news and prevent it from co-mingling with your Disaster headlines. In fact, this is a really neat feature, because each Category generates its own RSS feed. You can run a single site, but tie in the people you need with specific information.

One thing you might notice is I’ve got my Lessons divided into Weeks. For that, we need to go to the Manage/Categories area.

• Add three new categories:

1. 1. Red Cross
   2. Disasters – as a “child” of “Red Cross”
   3. Chapters – as a “child” of “Red Cross”

I’m not going to walk you through all of that. It should be a little more natural now.

What I *will* ask you to do is do a little major editing on your site. It turns out that we don’t want to have “Humanitarian Principles” as a Page. We need to get it in as a post. So…

1. Edit your Humanitarian Priniciples page
2. Copy everything into your Clipboard.  (Highlight it all and press CTRL-C does it too.)
3. Go to “Write/Post”
4. Paste it in, add a title.
5. DON’T PUBLISH just yet.  Remember, your Humanitarian Principles was written more than a week ago.  If you save it, it will become the most recent post.  So we need to change the Timestamp.  Click on the “+” for Post Timestamp, and set it for a week or two in the past.
6. Now click Publish.

One more cool thing about those editing boxes to the right:  if you have Java enabled, you can drag them and drop them like your Sidebar widgets.  If you find you are using some of them more than others, you can drag them to the top where they’ll do you some good.

Now that you have some skills under your belt, here’s a little more homework for you:

1. Write three new posts this week, but make sure they are tagged for different dates.  Use the Timestamp option.
2. Write at least one post for “the future.”  If you set a timestamp for this coming Monday, it will not show up until then.  So write a nice note to Ike, asking how his weekend was.  If you post-date it properly, I’ll see it first thing Monday morning!
3. Edit your past posts, and add some categories to them.  “Personal”, “Work stuff”, “Football”, “Recipes”, whatever.
4. Comment below on this lesson TWICE.  Once to verify you’ve read it, and once to verify you’re done with the lesson.
5. Be watching my feed for Lesson 3-3…