WordPress is a very powerful and complicated program. It is basically a shell which invokes other programs called plugins which are 2nd party programs with specific functionality.
You can log on to wordpress either as “admin” or as a user. Admin has many more options than an ordinary user. I will only discuss the options available to a user.
When you logon to wordpress, you have to give your username and your password. This will bring up the Dashboard which has a list of topics that you can work on. There are basically 3 topics that we will be interested in. (media library, posts, and pages) The media library contains all of the pictures that get used in the final product. You can usually crop the pictures and do various other editing functions on them. You can add pictures to the library for later use.
Every wordpress application has a “theme”. You have to be “admin” to modify it. The theme controls the menubar, the “search icon”, the “archives”, the “latest posts”, the “related posts”, the map at the bottom of each post or page. We may change that at some point, but need more input as to whether folks like it. It would be desirable to train someone on how to be admin for future updates.
Pages and posts are the basic building blocks that we use to build our website. Pages offer many more features than posts, but are more complicated to build and maintain.
Posts allow you to enter text and pictures. They are easy to edit, you just use the edit feature which is like editing a text file with notepad or some other simple editor. Using a post is a good way to break up a topic into smaller sections. If you go to “wta blog” under “about us”, you will get a list of all the posts that have been entered. If you want to create a new post, you go to
“Posts” and “new” on the dashboard and you will get a window to create a new post.
If you want to edit a post or clone an existing post, you go to “All posts”, and select one from the list. At the top of the list you will see 4 categories, “All”, Mine”, “Published” and “Drafts”. Select which of the sublists you want to work with. Select a post from the list and you can then edit it. When you get through editing it, you have to hit the “Update” button in the upper right hand column to save your work.
Pages are composed of text, widgits, and links to various posts. There is also some inherited information on each which comes from the theme. On the dashboard, go to “Pages”. To reate a new one, go to “Add New”. To edit an existing page, go to “All Pages” and you will get a list of existing pages. Again, at the top you will get the same 4 categories as for posts. I work mostly out of the “Mine” sublist, but occasionally go to “published” to get one of the existing pages. I’m not sure how new pages get moved from “mine” to “published”.
You can hit the plus sign in the top left corner to add a new widgit. There are 50 or so, but we only use a small subset. You just click on the desired widgit and it will come up in edit mode.
To edit a page, you don’t use the “edit” button, because that brings up some html which you don’t want to work with. Instead, you use “edit with visual composer” button which allows you to edit the various components. There are 2 parts to each component. When you move your cursor around, you will see some things in orange and some things in green. The things in orange are the options on that widget. The green things are the content. Hit the button in the middle with a pencil on it to perform an edit. When you have finished your changes, hit “Save Changes”, and “Close”. Then hit the “Update” button in the top right corner, and hit the back arrow to go back to the dashboard.
When you are editing a post, you will see a column on the right hand side of the page. You can enter a tag which can be searched for, a featured image which will show up at the top of the page, and some other features.
Visual composer is a plugin which was set up from the original installation. If you try and start from scratch with WordPress, you get a different plugin. That makes it hard to develop the WTA website, so it’s not worth spending time on.