5 WordPress Secrets You Need to Know

Learning Online

[tweetmeme source=”ileane”]I currently have a 30-day free pass to explore the entire software training library at Lynda.com. If you’ve never heard of Lynda.com, just trust me this is a HUGE deal.

See here’s the thing, the web is over-flowing with a plethora of amazing websites promising to make you richer, smarter, skinnier, closer to God or to simply help manage your tweets. They all seem intriguing enough but unless I find out that the services offered are FREE, I am totally not interested. Like the old saying goes, The Best Things in Life Are Free.

I’ve known about Lynda.com for a few years now, and if you go to the site you’ll see that you can poke around and view a smidgen of content from each module without paying the $25 monthly fee.  And now that I have access to view all of the tutorials I am soaking up knowledge like a sponge.

WordPress is intuitive

The first module I viewed on Lynda.com is WordPress.com 2.7 Essential Training with Maria Langer. I’d previously watched WordPress tutorials on YouTube and on WordPress.tv and I find the platform very intuitive and user-friendly. I assumed that viewing this module would reinforce what I already knew and perhaps explain a thing or two that I was curious about. I ended up adding tons of new blogging skills to my arsenal and I’m sure you will also. So without further delay, here’s the list of 5 WordPress Secrets You Need to Know.

1. More tags
2. The Kitchen Sink Button
3. Adding or Inviting other users
4. Understanding Pingbacks
5. Editing Images

5 WordPress Secrets You Need to Know

#1.

See that?  That was me adding a more tag. I like using more tags because it allows you to add a break in a long post so that readers don’t need to scroll so much.

The red arrow points to the more tag on your tool bar. Using the more tag also allows you have more posts showing on the home page of your blog. You can go into the HTML edit view and customize the message.  Simply add a space after <!--more, and type what you want it to say.

The more tag adds a "Read More" link anywhere you want in your post

#2.

Click the kitchen sink button to reveal an entire hidden row of formatting tools.

The Kitchen Sink Button Opens a Second Row of Formatting Tools

I was pretty confused by this hidden second row of formatting tools. I thought that my formatting options were limited by the WordPress theme that I’m currently using. And I must admit, I never even wondered what that bizarre looking icon was for. Now that I know what I was missing, I promise to one day go back and add some formatting to the 18 posts that I published before Lynda.com introduced me to the kitchen sink button. (Yeah right, don’t believe that!)

#3.

You can add or invite other users to your blog that can have various levels of authority and control over the content that is published to your blog. Here’s the hierarchy:

• Administrator (that’s you sweetie) has complete control over posts, pages, themes etc.
• Editors (that’s your mom or best friend) can edit any content and publish posts
• Authors (that’s someone who can write better than you) can add and publish posts

• Contributors (that’s someone you’ve tricked into writing a post for you) can add posts and edit any posts that they’ve added

From the dashboard select Users and Invites to get to this form. Stay tuned for more details and possibly a new post from and invited guest blogger.

Add or Invite Users With This Form

#4.

Since Lynda.com explained to me what a pingback is (such an odd term isn’t it?) I know how to spot one and I’m beginning to understand how using pingbacks can send additional traffic to my blog.

You’ll see a comment to a post or page that looks like this:

This is a pingback

The pingback in your comments lists starts with – bracket […] end bracket. This means that another blogger included a link in their post back to your post. This also indicates to readers that the two blogs share related content.

#5.

Adding media to a post is fairly easy in WordPress but if you need to change the way images appear in your post here are a few pointers:

The Edit Image Icon

If you need to change the size or other attributes of an image, click the image to invoke the edit image icon (don’t make a mistake and click the red delete icon; like I did over, and over, and over again). You can easily make your image smaller by reducing the percentage of its size.

Change your image settings

There you go, I hope you find these helpful. Stop back for more tips and techniques that I will share with you as I learn them. Happy blogging.

Smooches!

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