WordPress for Education: Create interactive and engaging e-learning websites with WordPress book and ebook

While they perform two different functions, the post and page editors look and act in a very similar way. As described in Chapter 1, Installing and Configuring WordPress, creating a new post or page is as simple as choosing the Add New option, typing some text, and clicking on the Publish button. Fortunately, WordPress provides a great deal of flexibility when it comes to the content and formatting of a post or page.

When writing or editing posts/pages, we are given the choice of using either the Visual editor or HTML editor. By default we are presented with the Visual editor, which acts similarly to a word processor. Clicking on the HTML tab will switch to the HTML editor, allowing those who know HTML the ability to directly edit the markup of a post or page.

When in Visual editor mode, there is a row of buttons between the Title and Post Editing area that allow us to control the formatting of our text. The first several buttons perform basic text formatting...

Adding a selection of Pages can turn our WordPress site from a simple blog, to a fully-functioning course site. In this section, we will add a home page to our site, create a syllabus page from a Word document, and delete the WordPress sample page.

Regularly writing posts will keep students updated on the latest course news, assignments, and supplemental course materials. In this section we will create a new post that contains a video, update our site's Hello World post, and keep our posts organized by using categories and tags.

Adding a video to a post

WordPress has made embedding videos from popular media sites such as YouTube or Vimeo a straightforward process. To begin, create a new post by hovering over the + New button in the admin toolbar and click on the Post button. Enter a descriptive title for the post within the title box.

To embed the video from popular video services, click on the HTML tab above the post editor and paste the URL of the video's web page into the new post. Optionally, press on Return key, click on the Visual tab to return to the visual editor, and type a corresponding message for the post.

The following screenshot shows our video post as it appears in the WordPress Post editor:

The following screenshot...

One of the advantages of using a content management system such as WordPress is that the site's content is separated from the visual design. Because of this, we are able to easily update the look of our site.

Themes is the term WordPress uses to describe the templates that control the appearance of our site. All new WordPress sites use a theme entitled Twenty Eleven.

Due to the popularity of WordPress there are currently well over a thousand free themes available through WordPress.org. Additionally, there are hundreds of premium themes for sale around the web.

We can easily search for and install free themes from within the WordPress interface. To add themes, hover over the Appearance tab in the left sidebar and choose the Themes option. This will present us with the Manage Themes screen. To search for new themes, click on the Install Themes tab at the top of the page. From here we can choose to search for themes, upload our own theme, or browse through the featured and recently...

Widgets are small pieces of functionality or content that can be added to specific areas of our site. WordPress offers a variety of widgets including category lists, links, recent comments, text areas, tag clouds, and a search box. These widgets can be added to any widget-ready area of our site.

The most common widget area is a sidebar, though many themes support a variety of other widget ready areas, including the header and footer. The widget areas will vary based on what is supported by the active theme.

To access the Widget screen, hover over the Appearance tab and choose the Widgets field. The Available Widgets page appears in the main area of the screen. The available widget areas are seen in the right sidebar. To add a widget, click-and-drag the available widget to the desired widget area.

In our sample course site, I've chosen to add several widgets:

The WordPress menu feature allows us to create a custom navigation menu for our site. By default, WordPress creates navigation links for each new page, but we are able to create a custom menu that also includes post categories and links to other websites.

To create a menu, form the WordPress dashboard, hover over the Appearance tab in the left sidebar and choose the Menus tab. Enter a name for the menu and click on the blue Create Menu button.

Select the pages to add to the menu within the Pages box on the left side of the screen and click on the Add to Menu button. Because this menu will most likely be replacing the site's default navigation it is a good idea to select all of the pages.

To add a post category to the navigation menu, click on the appropriate checkbox within the Categories box and click on the Add to Menu button. In the case of our course site, adding the Assignment category will give our students quick access to all assignment posts on the site.

To add outside links...

Through this chapter we've taken a closer look at Pages and Posts by exploring the visual editor, publishing options, categories, and tags. We created a page titled Home and set it as the static home page of our site as well as a Syllabus page with content copied and pasted from a Word processor. We updated a post with an image and new text and wrote a new post that includes an embedded video.

Additionally, we gave our site a fresh look by searching for and installing a new theme. With our new theme in place, we added additional content and functionality using widgets and created a custom menu for improved navigation.

In the next chapter we will look at the use of WordPress plugins to enhance the functionality of our site.