Managing Pages in WordPress

WordPress is by far the most used CMS platform because of how easy it is to manage pages, blog posts, and typical website content without the need of a developer. Pages are very easy to manage in WordPress and are most likely the staple of your website site aside from your blog posts. The pages can be found on the left hand menu below media and posts as shown here:

 

Bulk Edit:

You can either view all the pages by clicking on pages as you see the screen here above or add a new page. By default you can filter by dates. You can select a page or all pages and apply certain bulk actions to them. So for instance if you wanted to change the author for multiple pages, or change the template you could do that with the bulk actions edit feature as shown here. Once you click update it will update the pages you have selected with the changes you want.
 

Quick Edit:

If you scroll over one of the pages you want to edit you can actually do quick edit instead of going to the actual page to edit it. This is useful if you simply want to change the page title or other basic meta information about the page. You can change the author, date, template, status and more without having to actually go over to the pages screen in the WordPress admin panel.
 

 

Editing a Page:

If you add a new page or edit an existing page you will actually go to the page itself in the admin panel. Here you have the most control to change the page and all the content on it. You can start by creating the title at the top, below that you can also change the permalink which will be the actual link of the page. This is something you will want to make SEO friendly.
Wysiwyg:
Below the title and permalinks you will have the actual Wysiwyg editor and media. With the add media button you can easily add new images or existing images to a page. The default Wysiwyg editor allows you to easily make text bold, italic, crossed out, bulleted, quoted, add a horizontal line, left align text, center text, or right align text. You can also add a link, remove a link, or add a read more tag for where you want content to be cut off on a blog listing page.
If you select the toggl botton on the far right you have even more options. Here you can change your paragraph to different headers, underline text, justify text, change the text color, paste as text, clear formatting, add a large list of special characters, decrease or increase indents, undo or redo, and see all the short cuts.
This is a lot of power to control the content on a page without any actual coding expertise which is part of what makes WordPress so useful.

Text Editor:

Sometimes you will need to go into the actual code of the content of a page to accomplish some things that the Wysiwyg may either be having trouble with or not able to accomplish. Here you can add any html tag or inline css to make the content more dynamic that perhaps what the Wysiwyg can do on its own. For instance we use the Foundation framework and sometimes it is useful to call center Foundation CSS classes on a page to accomplish a task rather than using the Wysiwyg editor.

Publish:

One of the great features of WordPress is its publishing capabilities so that you can draft and preview your pages before you actually publish them live. You can also set them pending for someone else to review them. With the publishing feature you have the ability to hide pages to be password protected per page, and you can also change the publish data as well. You can actually schedule a draft to go live on a certain date programmatically so you don’t have to manually publish a page. WordPress also has a revisions ability so that you can see old revisions of your pages.

Page Attributes:

Page attributes allow you to choose a parent page, the page template, and the sort order of the page. The page template is most likely the main thing you will want to control but the order and parent of the page could be important depending on your theme and how you built your WordPress website.

Featured Image:

The featured image can be used for many different purposes. For instance, the featured image can be used to display the main image of the page on a listing page that might feature that page. It could also be displayed on a certain part of the page depending on how the template was designed.

Plugins and Special Features:

Many page templates will have much more than these default features based on the plugins and features you have built into your page templates and WordPress theme. Plugins like Yoast SEO plugin, Advanced Custom Field, Easy Social Share Buttons, and more could add significant functionality to your pages. You could also have short codes that you can insert into the Wysiwyg to display special types of content without having to actually code them out.