Pages are the web pages that are listed in the navigation menu (and a few more, like this one, that are hidden from the average viewer). Posts are used for things like News items, as well as Snippets – small chunks of text that can be dropped into particular bits of a page.
Making a new page
- Choose New Page from the Admin Bar.
- Give the page a title (the box along the top).
- If necessary, adjust the Status, Visibility, Parent and Order of the page (see below).
- Press the blue Publish/Update button to save your changes.
At this point, the page has no content – but it’s worth saving it at this stage so that it’s established in the site hierarchy and – unless you’ve set the Visibility to Private or the Status to Draft – will appear in the navigation menu(s).
You can now start typing the main content in the Visual Editor (or the HTML Editor, if you prefer) – see the pages on Using the editing panel and Working with text. Remember to save your work frequently, using the Update button.
Status
To the right of the Editing panel, you can set the Status of the page to Published, Draft, or Pending Review. Only Published pages will be visible to ordinary site visitors.
Visibility and Password protection
Pages can be Public (visible to everybody, when Published), Password Protected, or Private (visible only to logged-in users). Use the Visibility -> Edit link to the right of the Editing panel to set these options.
To password-protect the page, select Password protected, type a password, and click OK. If you want to make certain areas of the site available to members only, make sure all the relevant pages have the same password, and give it to members when they join up. (This is the free way of creating a ‘members only’ area. The alternative, with systems for registration, login, lost password etc, is fairly costly to set up – but Wingfinger can do this, if required.)
Parent and Order – adjusting the navigation menu structure
Any new page that you create will appear at the top level of the navigation unless you specify that it’s a sub-page of another page. In the right-hand column is a box called Page Attributes. In here you can select the Parent page from the menu (the main page that your new one is a sub-page of). You can also change the order of the menu items (default is alphabetical) by assigning a number to the page in the Order box. At any given menu level, any numbered pages will display in numeric order.
Page extras
Although the main meat of any page will be in the main content area, it’s often the page extras in other areas – the photos, category listings, blog excerpts, graphic links and widgets of one sort or another – that add visual interest to the page. A set of Wingfinger Widgets allows you to insert page extras in these other editable regions of the page. Wingfinger Widgets are all controlled in the same way, using the Custom Fields area below the main Editing panel. For more information, see Wingfinger widgets – the basics.
Making a new post
New posts are created in a similar way to pages, except they usually need at least one post Category assigning to them and they do not appear in the navigation menus.
The category needs to be selected from a list of options in the Category box – over on the right (under the date). If the post doesn’t belong in an obvious category such as News or Events, but has been created for use as a page extra or as part of a Wingfinger Widget (eg: a slideshow), it probably belongs in the Snippet category.
If you want to start a new major category of posts that you will eventually want to appear listed on a page (eg: Blog), you can add the new category name in the box under the list of categories. See also, the reference page for the List widget.
Excerpts
Posts should usually be written with an introductory paragraph or two that work well on their own as a teaser. This should be followed by a click of the More button (above the editing window) – which will result in this…
More…
When a post created in this way is displayed by the List widget in excerpts mode, the rest of the text will be suppressed, and the link will take the reader to the full stand-alone post (without the More link).
Special items
This is a catch-all term we’re using to cover other items that you might want to include in the main content area of a page or post when you’re using the Editing panel. (Not to be confused with page extras, which are used to add content to the other editable areas of a page – mainly the side column(s).)
Videos
In YouTube
- Upload your video to YouTube (you will need a YouTube account to do this)
- Select video in Youtube
- Click on Share tag
- Click on Embed tag
- Deselect Show suggested videos when the video finishes
- Set the iframe custom size to fit your site
- Copy the iframe code from box.
In the WordPress HTML Editor
- Click to set the text insertion point.
- Paste the iframe code into the content.
Example:
<iframe width="380" height="237" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CENw-3cRbLc?rel=0" frameborder="0"></iframe>
RSS feed links
Each category of post has its own RSS feed. This takes the form:
http://www.yourdomain/category/the-category-slug/feed.
You can find the slug (the computer-friendly name) for the category, by clicking Posts -> Categories in the main Admin menu.