For a quick overview of cre­at­ing con­tent in Word­Press, down­load the two-page Prince­ton Word­Press Quick­start Guide (PDF). The full text of the guide is after the break.

(Updated Jan­u­ary 23, 2012, for Word­Press 3.3 — Michael)

Prince­ton Word­Press Quick­start Guide

Log­ging in

If you are work­ing with a new site on the Word­Press ser­vice, you should find a log-in link in the site’s side­bar menu. Click this link and enter your Prince­ton netID and pass­word on the sub­se­quent page to log in. Log­ging in should redi­rect you back to the site from which you orig­i­nated, and the Word­Press Admin Tool­bar should now be across the top of the site.

If no log-in link is avail­able, the log-in URL for the main site admin is at  http://blogs.princeton.edu/wp-admin. Then use the Admin Tool­bar to nav­i­gate to your site’s Dash­board. From the Dash­board, you can add posts or pages, change themes, etc. If you are asso­ci­ated with more than one site in the sys­tem, look for a but­ton in the Admin Tool­bar labeled My Sites. Hov­er­ing over this but­ton shows a hier­ar­chi­cal drop­down of your sites.

Posts and pages

Word­Press allows you to post con­tent via two main con­tent types: posts and pages. Posts are what peo­ple gen­er­ally think of with blog pub­lish­ing. Posts are pieces of con­tent asso­ci­ated with the date they were com­posed. Using posts, the front page of a site, for exam­ple, can dis­play many posts in chrono­log­i­cal order. Pages are usu­ally more sta­tic, such as an “About me” page. Page nav­i­ga­tion in Word­Press sites is often via a hor­i­zon­tal menu that can be hierarchical.

Select either Post or Page from the left hand menu, and then click on the Add New link. After you have cre­ated a post or page, click Pub­lish to add it to the site. You can see how your new post or page looks on your site by click­ing the Pre­view but­ton or View Post.

You can also go back and edit an exist­ing post. Click on Posts (or Pages) in the left-hand menu then hover your mouse over the title of the post you would like to edit. Sev­eral links should appear directly below the title, includ­ing one labeled Edit.

Tags and categories

Word­Press allows you to attach tags and cat­e­gories to posts. Tags and Cat­e­gories serve sim­i­lar func­tions but are slightly dif­fer­ent. You can group your posts into Cat­e­gories in case you later want to dis­play them as a menu on your site. Tags can be used to mark or label posts with a spe­cific word so it’s eas­ier to search for them on your site. To add a Tag or a Cat­e­gory to your site, you can go to Posts in your Dash­board and choose either Cat­e­gories or Post Tags. You can also add new Tags or Cat­e­gories while cre­at­ing or edit­ing a post.

Adding images, doc­u­ments, video, and audio

You can add images, video, audio, and doc­u­ments to a post or page. Above the textbox in the edi­tor, you there is an Upload/Insert label and an Add Media but­ton. Click­ing that but­ton opens a dia­log with a drag-and-drop inter­face that dynam­i­cally detects the type of media you are upload­ing. You will have a choice of adding a file from your com­puter, from a URL, or from the col­lec­tion of files you already uploaded (Media Library).

You can fill in meta­data and choose where to posi­tion the image or media in the post. To com­ply with Fed­eral and Uni­ver­sity acces­si­bil­ity require­ments, make sure you fill in the Alter­nate Text field for images.

The max­i­mum file upload size is 5 MB. You may want to store larger videos on an exter­nal video shar­ing ser­vice. For YouTube videos, you can sim­ply copy the video URL and paste the plain text URL into the post. The dynamic embed­ding fea­ture (oEm­bed) will take care of the rest.

Chang­ing the theme

You can change the design of your site by chang­ing the theme. Click on the Appear­ance link on on the left side of the Dash­board to choose a theme. You can click on the theme to see a pre­view of how that design will look with your con­tent. Once you have selected a theme, click on the Acti­vate link on the top of the pre­view win­dow or click the Acti­vate link at the bot­tom of the blog descrip­tion. Depend­ing on the theme, you can also mod­ify the header image and load a new one to give your blog a unique look and feel. You can do this through the Appear­ance menu drop­down. If you have con­fig­ured cus­tom menus or wid­gets, you will have to re-add them after chang­ing your theme. Dif­fer­ent themes will often have theme-specific options and theme-specific widgets.

Adding a list of links

One way to add a list of links to your site is to select the Links menu in your Dash­board. Click the Add New but­ton and fill out the name and the URL of the link you would like to add. To dis­play a list of links on your site, you will have to add a Links Wid­get to your side­bar. Wid­gets are under the Appear­ance menu in the Dash­board. To acti­vate the Links Wid­get, drag it to the Pri­mary Wid­get Area. Click the Save but­ton and the links will appear in your site sidebar.

Mod­er­at­ing comments

If you want to see, con­trol, and reply to com­ments left on your site, click on the Com­ments menu on the left-hand side of the Dash­board or click the speech bal­loon but­ton in the Admin Tool­bar. Here you can see all com­ments that are left at each post (includ­ing replies that you, as the author, have made to com­ments). You can mark cer­tain com­ments as spam, or you can approve the com­ment, and it will be pub­lished to the post or page. To set up cer­tain rules for spam, com­ment mod­er­a­tion, and black­list cer­tain words so they never show up on your blog, go to Set­tings and choose Dis­cus­sion. Here you can indi­cate how com­ments should be mod­er­ated and whether you should be noti­fied when com­ments are added to the site. Click Save Changes at the bot­tom when you are finished.

Log­ging out

To log out of your Word­Press site, go to the top left of your screen and click on your user­name. In the drop down, you will see a menu option for you to log out. Once you log out, you will need to sign in again to make any edits or changes to your blog.

Addi­tional help

Addi­tional help can be found at http://lynda.princeton.edu under the fol­low­ing Word­Press course: Word­Press 3 Essen­tial Train­ing.