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WordPress guides

There are more editing fields available to you than you see on first login. The Screen Options area allows you to choose which Post Fields are displayed or hidden from your editing area, which allows you to minimize clutter and customize according to your needs.

Pre-Login Captchas WordPress Guide Sucuri

WordPress Security

WordPress is renowned for its usability and ease of access, however it’s popularity also makes it an attractive target for bad actors. This WordPress security guide is an introduction into how to protect visitors, mitigate threats, and create a more secure WordPress site.

Recent statistics show that over 28% of website administrators across the web use WordPress. Its popularity comes at a price; often targeted by malicious hackers and spammers who seek to leverage insecure websites to their advantage.

WordPress security is about risk reduction, not risk elimination. Because there will always be risk, securing your WordPress site will remain a continuous process, requiring frequent assessment of these attack vectors.

Is WordPress Secure?

The question of whether WordPress is secure or not depends entirely on you, the website owner. Website security is about risk reduction. Follow our WordPress security best practices to harden and protect your website from threats.

How to Secure a WordPress Site

Post Field Descriptions

Adding a new post in the classic editor.

This box should contain the title of your post. You can use any phrase, words, or characters. (Avoid using the same title on more than one page.) You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the post like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid.” WordPress will then clean it up to generate a user-friendly and URL-valid name of the post (also called the “post slug”) to create the permalink for the post.

Permalink stands for “permanent link.” That means a post URL that does not expose the post ID which could be subject to a change (e.g. when moving to different blogging system), but it rather contains a user-friendly post name derived from the post title which could also change, although not recommended, but in a more controllable way. This post name (also referred to as “post slug” or just “slug”) can be edited, depending on your Permalinks settings, using the “Edit” button. (To change your settings, go to Administration Screens > Settings > Permalinks). The permalink is automatically generated based on the title you set to the post and is shown below the title field. Punctuation such as commas, quotes, apostrophes, and invalid URL characters are removed and spaces are substituted with dashes to separate each word. If your title is “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”, it will be cleaned up to create the slug “my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid”. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to “my-site-lookin-at-you-kid”.

The blank box where you enter your writing, links, images, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the visual (WYSIWYG) editor or the text view to compose your posts. For more on the text view, see the section below, Visual Versus Text Editor.

Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Draft and Published. Draft means the post has not been published and remains in draft status for the post creator. A Published status means the post has been published and is live on your site.

Status
If you select a specific publish status (click Edit next to Status:Draft) and click the update post or “Publish” button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all posts organized by status by going to Administration Screens > Posts > Edit).

Visibility
This determines how your post appears to the world. (click Edit next to Visibility) Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site).

Scheduling
To schedule a post for publication on a future time or date, click Edit next to the words “Publish immediately.” You can also change the publish date to a date in the past to back-date posts. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also click the Publish button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.

The general topic of the post. It is typical for a blog to have 7-10 categories for content. Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category. You can manage your categories by going to Administration Screens > Posts > Categories.

These are micro-categories for the post, similar to including index entries for a page. Posts with similar tags are linked together when a user clicks one of the tags. Tags have to be enabled with the right code in your theme for them to appear in your post. Add new tags to the post by typing the tag into the box and clicking “Add.” You can also click on the “Choose from the most-used tags” link to see all of the tags used by the site.

A summary or brief teaser of your post that may appear on the front page of your site as well as on the category, archives, and search non-single post pages. Note: the Excerpt does not usually appear by default. It only appears in your post if you have modified the template file listing the post to use the_excerpt() instead of the_content() to display the Excerpt instead of the full content of a post. If so, WordPress will automatically use as the Excerpt the first 55 words of your post content or the content before the quicktag. If you use the “Excerpt” field when editing the post, this will be used no matter what. For more information, see Excerpt.

A way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks. No other action is necessary. For those blogs that don’t recognize pingbacks, you can send a trackback to the blog by entering the website address(es) in this box, separating each one by a space. See Trackbacks and Pingbacks for more information.

How to Use WordPress: A 7-Step Learning Process for Newbies

Let’s face it – if you want to truly learn WordPress, you’re going to put in a lot of time and energy to do so. No guide in the world is going to teach you absolutely everything, since it’s frankly impossible – there are endless different features related to this CMS, and even covering all of the widgets would probably take a couple of books.

Step 1: Take the Easy Route – Find a Reliable Hosting Provider

You see, with most website builders on the market, all you need to do is follow a few simple steps on their websites and you’re set – in 5 minutes or so, you’ll find yourself browsing through the site templates and working on your eCommerce features.

Frankly, there are two ways to go about it – either you download WP from the official website, set it up and work on a site offline, or you choose a hosting provider and take it from there. Here, we’ll focus mostly on the latter option.

WordPress tutorial: what manual setup of WordPress involves.

The reason behind this is pretty straightforward, too – setting up an offline WordPress site is a huge hassle, especially if you’ve never worked with MySQL before. Taking the hosting route, you’ll be able to rest assured that there won’t be any issues throughout the entirety of the process.

You see, choosing the right hosting provider is a crucial step – if you make the wrong choice, you don’t even need to read the rest of this WordPress tutorial. Frankly, your site will constantly crash, and you’ll have a pretty bad time, in general.

Once you’ve chosen your hosting service and also the optimal plan for yourself (my advice would be to start off on the lower end, especially if it’s your first site), in most cases, you’ll be provided with the option to one-click-install and launch WordPress.

WordPress tutorial: purchasing a shared hosting plan from Hostinger.

As a side note, you should also take the time to get to know your hosting provider’s dashboard (i.e. the cPanel). Here, you’ll have to spend time managing your WP site, backing files up, archiving them, and so on.

Another thing that you should figure out while working with your hosting provider is the domain name to your site. Many of the hosting services are going to provide you with a free subscription for a custom domain upon purchasing one of their plansthat’s the best route to take. Keep in mind, though, that it’s a reoccurring subscriptionmeaning, you’ll probably have to extend it in a year or so.

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Step 2: Accessing Your Website

There are a couple of ways to access your WP dashboard. The easiest route would be to go there via a button from your hosting provider’s panel – no matter your hosting service of choice, there should be one available.

WordPress tutorial: WP dashboard.

Another route that you’d find mentioned in many user WordPress tutorials would be to simply enter the name of your domain into the URL bar, and then add “/dashboard” or “/admin”. So, if the name of your domain is “mywordpresswebsite.com”, it would look like so:

There isn’t really a difference between the two above-mentioned dashboard accessing routes. That said, if you want to learn WordPress, it might actually be easier to follow the latter, since you can simply access it by typing some information into the URL bar, instead of having to go and log into your hosting service panel every time.

Have you ever wondered which website builders are the best for your business?

Step 3: Get to Know the Interface

In all honesty, even today, every single time I log into WP, I get some nostalgic vibes from the homepage section. While I’ve altered it with some plugins and other widgets, the core design is still the same – classic WordPress.

WordPress tutorial: getting started with WordPress.

At this point, you should make sure to take your time to study the actual interface that you see in front of you. As noted above, it’s probably going to change significantly as you progress with your website and install more plugins, but still – the core idea will remain the same.

The cool thing about WordPress is that, while being significantly more complicated than a traditional website builder, it does have a more clear layout than most of the current builders out there. The design choices for the WP interfaces were very simple and old-school, but also very straightforward – that’s a good thing!

All of your main attention should be focused on the left side of your screen – namely, to the list of various interfaces that you can open. With some exceptions, this is the area that you be clicking through the most.

WordPress tutorial: the user interface.

If you want to learn WordPress “the proper way”, do make sure to not rush through the options that you see here. Every new button is going to have a few more pop-ups, so you should surely make sure to figure out where things are in the dashboard before progressing further.

Step 4: Theme Choice and Installation

While figuring out how to use WP might require a WordPress tutorial for beginners, there are some things that the CMS does have in common with other website builders out there. One of these things would have to be the theme selection.

In the “Appearance” section ("Theme" sub-section) on the left, you’ll be able to pick from a few different default themes. If you’d like to make your site more original, then you can always download new theme templatesones created by the WordPress community. The downloading and installation processes are actually quite simple – just find the desired theme, download and apply it.

WordPress tutorial: theme selection.

Make sure to try different themes out, and see which fits the “vibe” of your website best. You’ll be able to preview them, check how they work, and also even read some other user reviews and general feedback in the community section, too.

While it may take some time finding the best template for yourself, that’s normal – after all, there’s a pretty vast number to pick from! Do make sure to delete (rather, uninstall) the unused templates afterward – got to keep the dashboard uncluttered and working properly!

Step 5: Page Creation

Creating a specific page with WordPress is nothing like doing the same thing with a website builder. When you’re working with a builder, in the vast majority of cases, it’s going to have drag-and-drop functionality, and will abide by the “WYSIWYG” principle – in other words, you’ll be able to alter your page contents by clicking on a section, and the changes will look the same live as they do while you’re editing.

Sources:

https://sucuri.net/guides/wordpress-security/
https://wordpress.org/support/article/writing-posts/
https://www.mybestwebsitebuilder.com/learn/wordpress-tutorial
Wordpress guides

Workflow Note – With Quicktag buttons that insert HTML tags, you can for example click i to insert the opening tag, type the text to be enclosed, and click /i or Close Tags to insert the closing tag. However, you can eliminate the need for this ‘close’ step by changing your workflow a bit: type your text, select the portion to be emphasized (that is, italicized), then click i and your highlighted text will be wrapped in the opening and closing tags.

WordPress tutorial: WordPress plugins.

A Comprehensive WordPress Tutorial

A Comprehensive WordPress Tutorial

Did you know that around 35% of the entire web is built with WordPress? With an estimated 2 billion websites out there, that would make up around 700 million sitesabsolutely insane! No wonder that WordPress tutorials are among the most sought-after!

WordPress is a very unique website creation tool – I must say, out of all of the similar tools that I have used throughout my career, WP has been my favorite, hands-down. There are many reasons why that’s the case – we’ll get into it in a minute.

Now, do keep in mind that WP isn’t exactly a website builder per se – at least not the WordPress that we’ll be talking about in this article. If you’re interested in some of the more traditional website builders out there, do check out our list of the best builders on the current market.

Contributed by: Ilir Salihi

According to you, what is the best website builder for personal use?

For me, personally, WordPress is the best platform for building websites. But, WordPress can be overwhelming for many people that want to launch a new site and hit the ground running. When deciding on a platform for your website, take your level of "techiness" and experience learning new software into consideration. Many of the website builders available today have been designed for beginners. You can literally "drag and drop" your website together using a clean visual editor.

Table of Contents

WordPress Tutorial: Why Choose WordPress?

First up, before we get to the actual WordPress tutorial, I want to mention some of the most prominent features (benefits) that WP has, and why it’s worth using, even if you’ve never used a traditional website builder before.

The actual differences between the two depend on the CMS in questions – some content management systems are going to resemble traditional builder quite closely, yet will possess some CMS functionality (a close example to this would be Webflow).

WP is famous for having a pretty steep learning curve – if you’ve never created a site before, or even if you have some prior knowledge when it comes to website builders, it’s not really going to help you all that much here. As you’ll soon see in this WordPress tutorial, this site creation tool has some pretty distinct functionality aspects.

WordPress tutorial: trusted by 35% of the Web.

It’s quite simple, really – once you learn the ins and outs of WordPress, you’ll be able to create any and all types of websites you can possibly imagine. WP is literally unlimited in its capabilities, unlike most site builders out there.

Learning WordPress from WordPress tutorials is also exceptionally-rewarding if you’re planning a career in the field of IT, or even some of the more online marketing-related spheres. Website developers should also be aware that knowing how to use WP is a must in your field – it’s one of the fundamental tools used in this field of expertise.

Now, granted, this is a WordPress tutorial for beginners – while I won’t teach you how to integrate some custom code into your site or how to launch a full-fledged eCommerce platform with the help of this CMS, we’ll surely touch on some of the more fundamental aspects of WordPress.

Post Field Descriptions

Adding a new post in the classic editor.

This box should contain the title of your post. You can use any phrase, words, or characters. (Avoid using the same title on more than one page.) You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the post like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid.” WordPress will then clean it up to generate a user-friendly and URL-valid name of the post (also called the “post slug”) to create the permalink for the post.

Permalink stands for “permanent link.” That means a post URL that does not expose the post ID which could be subject to a change (e.g. when moving to different blogging system), but it rather contains a user-friendly post name derived from the post title which could also change, although not recommended, but in a more controllable way. This post name (also referred to as “post slug” or just “slug”) can be edited, depending on your Permalinks settings, using the “Edit” button. (To change your settings, go to Administration Screens > Settings > Permalinks). The permalink is automatically generated based on the title you set to the post and is shown below the title field. Punctuation such as commas, quotes, apostrophes, and invalid URL characters are removed and spaces are substituted with dashes to separate each word. If your title is “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”, it will be cleaned up to create the slug “my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid”. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to “my-site-lookin-at-you-kid”.

The blank box where you enter your writing, links, images, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the visual (WYSIWYG) editor or the text view to compose your posts. For more on the text view, see the section below, Visual Versus Text Editor.

Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Draft and Published. Draft means the post has not been published and remains in draft status for the post creator. A Published status means the post has been published and is live on your site.

Status
If you select a specific publish status (click Edit next to Status:Draft) and click the update post or “Publish” button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all posts organized by status by going to Administration Screens > Posts > Edit).

Visibility
This determines how your post appears to the world. (click Edit next to Visibility) Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site).

Scheduling
To schedule a post for publication on a future time or date, click Edit next to the words “Publish immediately.” You can also change the publish date to a date in the past to back-date posts. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also click the Publish button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.

The general topic of the post. It is typical for a blog to have 7-10 categories for content. Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category. You can manage your categories by going to Administration Screens > Posts > Categories.

These are micro-categories for the post, similar to including index entries for a page. Posts with similar tags are linked together when a user clicks one of the tags. Tags have to be enabled with the right code in your theme for them to appear in your post. Add new tags to the post by typing the tag into the box and clicking “Add.” You can also click on the “Choose from the most-used tags” link to see all of the tags used by the site.

A summary or brief teaser of your post that may appear on the front page of your site as well as on the category, archives, and search non-single post pages. Note: the Excerpt does not usually appear by default. It only appears in your post if you have modified the template file listing the post to use the_excerpt() instead of the_content() to display the Excerpt instead of the full content of a post. If so, WordPress will automatically use as the Excerpt the first 55 words of your post content or the content before the quicktag. If you use the “Excerpt” field when editing the post, this will be used no matter what. For more information, see Excerpt.

A way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks. No other action is necessary. For those blogs that don’t recognize pingbacks, you can send a trackback to the blog by entering the website address(es) in this box, separating each one by a space. See Trackbacks and Pingbacks for more information.

Step 5: Create Key Pages

Unless it’s designed to be a one-page site, every website should have at least a couple pages. For example an about page and a contact page. We also recommend a blog page to house your news or posts. But depending on your site’s purpose, you’ll probably want other pages as well. This could be a portfolio or gallery to show off your work. If you have products to sell, you’d want a store page. Keep in mind you may need or want to install plugins in order to add and customize these types of pages.

Homepage Template

Your homepage is the first page people will see when they go to your main url. Some themes will include a homepage template (like in the screenshot above). Or use a page builder to create something custom. There are many powerful WordPress page builder plugins to choose from.

Whatever you choose just remember to set the Homepage you created under the Settings > Reading section and selecting the “Static page” option (note: your blog can be your homepage, and if that’s what you want to use as your main front page just leave the “Your latest posts” option selected). For more help, checkout our guide on how to create homepage.

Total Multipurpose & Blogging WordPress Theme: Mason Demo

Most websites will have a blog – in fact, many sites are just a blog! Depending on your theme you may not need to create a blog page, as many blogging WordPress themes are already styled so you can just get to work adding posts. Some however do include a custom blog page template, which you can use by going to Pages > Add New and then selecting the “blog” template from a metabox to the right of or below the main text editor. Once you save your page, you’ll also need to define it as your blog under the Settings > Reading > Static page as your “Posts page” option.

About

About Us Section

About pages are great for businesses to share company history, mission statements and team members. Or for independent bloggers to share notes on how they got started, their interests and their personal story. While not every site needs one it’s a good page to consider. An about page is a great way to connect with your audience on a more personal level.

Contact

Contact Page Frontend

Pretty much every website will have a contact page. It’s fairly simple to create a contact page with WordPress, since there are a plethora of easy plugins compatible with popular themes. At the very least you can consider using one of these contact form plugins to add a simple form to your footer or sidebar, or a mapping plugin to showcase your locations.

Portfolio

Total WordPress Portfolio

For some businesses it makes sense to showcase your work, which is where a portfolio is very useful. To create an online portfolio you can either choose a theme or add a plugin that includes a portfolio custom post type. Custom post types add a new easy to find menu item in your main lefthand WordPress dashboard. These most often work just like adding a blog post. The difference is that they often features custom styles and options specific to their purpose. So a portfolio will typically include options to build galleries, upload videos or even audio so you can show potential clientele how awesome you are.

Store

Total Glitz&Glam WooCommerce Store

Lastly, whether you want to sell your own goods in an Etsy-like shop or recommend items from affiliate stores on your own site you can build an online store with WordPress. Specifically with the free WooCommerce plugin. Similar to a portfolio, WooCommerce (and other e-commerce platforms like EDD or Shopify) adds a custom post type. This includes custom options for your products such as digital/physical item, product gallery, product variations, coupons, shipping, taxes and more.

Step 6: Importing and Exporting Content

These tools often get overlooked in discussions about getting started. If you’re new to WordPress but not to blogging or website management, importing and exporting are handy tools to have, and easy to do. To move content from an old WordPress website, use the export tool. This will download an xml file of your site content.

WordPress Export Tool

To bring in your content from another site, use the import tool. If you purchase a premium theme it probably came with sample data (in the form of a .xml file) that you can import to help get you started. We recommend using the sample data if you need help figuring out how to use a theme or if you want to import an exact demo (especially when using themes like Total that have tons of sample demos to choose from).

WordPress Import Tool

Sources:

https://www.mybestwebsitebuilder.com/learn/wordpress-tutorial
https://wordpress.org/support/article/writing-posts/
https://www.wpexplorer.com/get-started-wordpress-guide/
Wordpress guides

Note that you can tweak a lot of settings, and in rare cases some of them could slow down your website. If you look at the documentation and manipulate only a few things at a time, everything will be just fine.

wordpress shortcode block

A Beginner’s Guide To Creating A WordPress Website

Daniel Pataki

2017 WordPress passed the 27% mark, running more than a quarter of all websites — and for good reason. It has a loyal user base and scores of dedicated developers who bring better features to the system year round.

This article is for those of you who either are new to WordPress or are regular users who want to learn about the best way to run a WordPress website. We’ll be learning about working with domains, installing WordPress, managing content and using great plugins and themes to secure our website and make our content shine.

I want to stress the same thing as I do when writing code-heavy articles: If you don’t understand everything here fully, don’t sweat it! Nothing is particularly difficult, but there is a lot to take in. We’ve all been there, we’ve all been confused by this stuff before. Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet and experiment; that’s how all of us learn about WordPress!

Meet Image Optimization, Addy Osmani’s brand new practical guide to optimizing and delivering high-quality images on the web. From formats and compression to delivery and maintenance: everything in one single 528-pages book.

Feature Panel

Table Of Contents

This article will be quite lengthy, so I thought it would be easier for you to see what we’ll be talking about in advance. If you already know about some of these, use it as navigation to skip to the parts you’re interested in.

The domain name identifies your website to users. Smashing Magazine’s domain name is smashingmagazine.com . The domain name shouldn’t be confused with the URL — domain names are a part of URLs.

  • https:// is the protocol that tells browsers how to retrieve data. Some well-known ones are http , https and ftp .
  • blog. is a subdomain that allows you to segment your website into different bits and pieces. You could use mywebsite.com/blog/ as well; it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
  • mywebsite.com is the domain name. The www (which comes before the subdomain, if any) is optional; you’ll need to decide on that. For the most part, it’s a matter of preference, but it can have an impact on large websites. The end of the domain name (in this case, .com ) is called a top-level domain (TLD). Others are .net and .org , country-specific ones such as .co.uk , .hu and .me and brand new ones like .xyz , .news and .media .
  • 80 is the port number used to gain access to the resource on the server. This is 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS, by default, which is why you can omit it in URLs. Ports are most often seen in local development environments.
  • /post/awesomeness.php is the path to the resource on the server. In this case, there may well be a folder named articles and a file named awesomeness.php , but the path doesn’t necessarily point to an actual file on the server. More often than not, the server and/or the code will figure out what you need based on the URL, rather than the URL linking to an actual file.
  • ?edit=false&view=true are parameters — two of them, actually. The first key-value parameter is preceded by a question mark; all subsequent pairs are preceded by ampersands. The server-side code picks up on these values, and the values can be used to modify views or save data, for example.
  • #comment-5 is an anchor that can be used to take the user to a specific place on the page right away. If you visit the link above, you will be taken lower down on the page to a specific comment.

If you don’t understand all of that, don’t worry about it; a lot of this isn’t relevant in everyday use. The only part you’ll need to focus on is the domain name because this is how users will refer to your website.

Choosing The Right Name

Choosing a domain name might be difficult, especially considering that the top tips for domains always include keeping it short and easy to type. If you already have a brand consisting of proper English words — like “Vintage Shoes” — then the domain name will probably already be taken.

You can find all sorts of tips on choosing a domain name, but it almost always boils down to keeping it short and memorable. This is definitely good advice, but always have a brand strategy in mind as well.

Smashing Magazine has a long-ish domain name, yet it is unlikely that much traffic is lost due to this — or that more could be gained by switching to smashingmag.com . Branding is, ultimately, the most important factor. A short and sweet domain name is great, but in the end, what you do with it is what counts.

Buying A Domain Name

I have to confess that I don’t always do that, for convenience’s sake, but the rationale is this: If someone can get into your hosting account, then they can steal files and data. If your domain is registered in the same place, then they could potentially transfer the domain away, leaving you with nothing.

If this is your first project, I suggest buying a domain name with the hosting provider you’ll be using (see further below for hosting tips). It will make the process easier, and you can always transfer the domain to another company if needed.

If you’re serious about branding and you have the funds, you might want to buy a number of TLDs with the same name. That is, if you are registering mydomain.com , then you might want to buy the .net , .org , .info and the local version as well (such as .co.uk ).

You will also have the option to choose the length of your registration, the default being one year. There has been some debate and uncertainty about how domain age and registration factor into search engine optimization (SEO). Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, has said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” which probably means you really shouldn’t. Again, if you have the funds, registering for five or six years is a lot more convenient.

The Difference Hosting and Domain Registration

The situation is similar to city parking garages that also offer cars for sale. You could buy a car from one of them and also store your car in their garage, but you could also store your car in another garage because the car is legally yours.

What Are WordPress Blocks?

Shortcodes were first … but then came block-based editing. With the introduction of WordPress 5.0 came the implementation of the long-planned Gutenberg editor or WordPress Block Editor as the main page and post editor for WordPress, replacing the classic WordPress text-based editor that’s been around for years.

But with the WordPress block editor came WordPress blocks. Gone are the formatting options at the top that are reminiscent of word processing applications like Microsoft Word. Instead, formatting options have been replaced with the tabbed right sidebar options for each block.

All the options and controls that were at the top now reside at the right side of the page/post editor, with tabs at the top indicating if you want to see the options for the current block alone or the whole document.

Reusable Blocks vs. Shortcodes

For example, if you add a button block and style it with a certain color, hover effects, etc., you wouldn’t want to keep doing that on each and every page you add that button to. If you change it to a reusable block, the button is saved on your WordPress site and becomes its own block that you can use on other pages or posts.

Group Blocks

Essentially, you are given the ability to group certain blocks together and move or update them all together. This eventually gave rise to block patterns. Block patterns have made editing content easier since users would much rather choose a pattern, and update the content rather than starting from a blank canvas.

Block Styling Options

Blocks & Full Site Editing

In the paste, most users could only update the actual body of a post or page. Certain aspects of the website, such as the header, footer, sidebars, and widgets, still largely depend on the theme. This of course made looking for the perfect theme with the right amount of options the ultimate struggle for developers and users of WordPress.

Looking forward, plugin and theme developers will need to adopt a different approach when developing their software to adapt to the new full site editing and page-building experience of the WordPress block editor. While the full application of this is still on the horizon, it’s a positive change that we’d likely see sooner rather than later.

Are There Any Good WordPress Courses?

As you can see in this review, WordPress is just the right choice for some projects. When compared to Wix or Squarespace, you will, of course, need more time in the beginning to get the hang of things. And even if WordPress is free in and of itself, hosting, templates and programming costs will most likely run you a higher bill than just going with a website builder.

But if you already know that your project is set to go beyond the scope of what a website builder can handle, we recommend investing the money and saving yourself the hassle of a move later on. WordPress is future-proof, and the possibilities that come with it are practically infinite.

About Robert Brandl, BA (Hons) Munich University MUAS

Hi, my name is Robert Brandl, and I am the founder of Tooltester. I used to work in a digital marketing agency where I managed website and email marketing projects. To optimize my client’s campaigns, I always had to find the optimal web tools. Tooltester (founded in 2010) opens this knowledge to you, hopefully saving you endless hours of research. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Sources:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/beginners-guide-creating-wordpress-website/
https://ithemes.com/blog/wordpress-shortcodes-complete-guide/
https://www.tooltester.com/en/website-with-wordpress/