Introducing the post editor view

- When you either create a new post or edit an old one you're always taken to the Post Editor View. This is typically where you will be doing the majority of your work in WordPress. Like all the Admin Panel views the Post Editor consists of a series of panels that serve different functions sorted in two columns. The left column holds features directly related to the post content. The right holds mainly features that have to do with the management and meta-data of the post. If this is the first time you're opening the Content Editor and you haven't already dismissed it you'll see a flag in the top corner informing you about the distraction free writing mode which can be toggled on and off with the switch to the far right of the toolbar.

I'm going to dismiss this flag and then click on distraction free writing mode. If you activate this feature and then place your cursor either in the title field or in the content field the distraction free writing mode will kick in and hide the Admin Menu and all the other panels from the Content Editor View to allow you to focus on the content you are writing. To reveal the hidden items simply move your mouse cursor or touch anywhere outside the Content Editor. You can also turn this feature off by toggling the distraction free writing mode again but I actually like to keep it on because it keeps me focused on the main content.

But for now we're going to keep it off so I can walk you through all the other features on this view. Starting from the top like you've seen we have the Title field. This is where you would enter the title of the post and when you do so, WordPress will automatically generate a permalink for us that you can see down here. Once the permalink is generated we can click on Edit to change the permalink. And you can also click the View Post button which will take you to a preview of this post.

Next we have the Content Editor. This is a WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get" style editor where you can write text and add images and other media content. The Content Editor has a toolbar which we'll address in more detail in the next movie that allows you to edit text like you would in a regular word processing application. In the default setup of WordPress when you scroll further down you'll see you have no more fields here below the Content Editor. But if you go to Screen Options you'll see there are a lot of features that are currently hidden including the Excerpt, Discussion, Author, and Trackbacks, all of which would appear underneath the Content Editor by default.

At the top of the right hand column you find the Publish panel where the status of the post can be changed from Draft to Publish and we control the publishing date and time of any post. Next we have the much maligned Post Formats panel which allows you to change the type of post you are publishing. This feature is theme dependent and we'll discuss it and why it's probably a good idea to hide it in a later movie. Below Post Formats we have two very important panels. Categories and Tags.

All posts must belong to at least one category and all posts can have as few or as many tags as you like. We'll go into detail about what these are and how to use them a little later on in the course. The last panel on the right hand column is the Featured Image. This is the image that will represent the post on index pages and on social media. And we'll talk about this in more detail later on as well. Before we start working with the Post Editor panel let me just quickly remind you that all the panels you see here with the exception of Title and the WYSIWYG editor can be collapsed using the toggle in the top right hand corner and also reorganized by simply grabbing them and dragging and dropping them to a different location.

You will also have noticed that under Screen Options you can actually change the layout here from a one column layout to a two column layout. Now this makes no sense on a widescreen like the one I'm using but if you are working on a smaller screen it might be a good idea to change it to a one column layout.