Contents
1. Posts, Taxonomies, and Media
Everything that you see on the frontend of the website is typically a Post, Taxonomy, or comes from the Media Library.
Posts:
- Custom pages and content like a blog post, calendar item, or homepage / landing pages are all types of Posts.
- Posts have at very least, a title, content, excerpt, slug, and optionally a featured image.
- Posts can be assigned to a Taxonomy – if any are available for them.
Taxonomy:
- The word Taxonomy refers to the practice and science of classification / categorization.
- Taxonomies are essentially groups of Posts.
- Taxonomies only have a title, description, and slug.
- The layout of a Taxonomy is typically fixed across the entire website, every taxonomy item will display the group of Posts the same way.
- There can be multiple types of Taxonomy, e.g. Event Category, Business Category, Blog Post Category, etc.
Media:
- Found at Media Library in the backend.
- Contains your documents, photos, and other website media.
- Items here can be added to posts as links, or as images / file downloads.
- Media can have a title, caption, alternative text, and description. The only field to typically worry about here is the alternative text, if the image is decorative in nature it can be left blank, or if it is functional in some way or supplements the text on the page, it should be a description of the image.
(How to write alternative text)
2. Block & Post Editor
Whenever you create or edit a post, you’ll be brought to a page with either a Block Editor or a Classic Editor. You can tell which by looking in the top left of the screen and looking for a WordPress logo with a to the right of it. If you see that, then you’re in the Block Editor, otherwise you’re in the Classic Editor.
Exactly how the editor page is laid out will vary, but the common elements are as follows:
- Add title – This is the title of the post.
- Content – Below the title is your content, either in the block editor, or as a word-style classic editor page. (How to use the block editor)
- Metaboxes – You’ll see sections on the page title titles like Yoast SEO, Categories, Tags, etc. these are all considered metaboxes. They extend or form part of the extra options for the page.
To learn more about the editor, see this post.
3. Post Statuses
Posts can be in several statuses like: Draft, Publish, and Private.
- Draft – Post has no URL, cannot be accessed by the public, only previewed by you and other editors.
- Publish – The post is live, and has a URL, and is usually public.
- Private – The post is live, but only visible to site admins and editors.
4. Menus
To manage the links on your top navigation or other menus, go to Appearance -> Menus in the backend. This lets you select from posts and taxonomies on the site to add links on the menu.
You can also go to a published post or taxonomy in the backend, find the “View” or “URL” link and right click to copy it, if you don’t want to add it to a menu.
5. URLs
Every URL on your website is made up of three parts:
https://<yourdomain.tld>/<taxonomies-or-dates>/<slug>/
- <yourdomain.tld> – Your domain name, for example, for this website it is kb.pronetsweb.com you have no control over this part as it’s determined by your web hosting.
- <taxonomies-or-dates> – May not appear on every link, if your post has taxonomies and is configured to display in a hierarchy with the taxonomy prefixed it will appear. Usually you can only control this indirectly by changing the primary category.
- <slug> – You control this part directly on posts and taxonomies, by default it is a converted version of your post title e.g. “My Great Post” becomes “my-great-post.” You can go into a post or taxonomy, and edit the URL or slug option to change this.