Hello, dear reader! I am Peter Shebek, a student attending Scottsdale Community College who’s planning to graduate next year. One of classes that I am attending this Fall involves the same program in which this blog is published through – WordPress. Here, I am going to post content that correlates to the WordPress class that I am attending as well as certain aspects of the textbook that I am reading to help me learn the basics of WordPress as the weeks progress during the remainder of the Fall 2022 semester, WordPress 5 Complete (Seventh Edition), beginning with what I have learned in Chapters 2 and 3 along with a favorite quotation of mine. Happy reading!
- What I have learned in chapter 2 of the textbook has to do with the WP-admin panel. The WP-admin panel is a flexible and powerful administration area where the user can manage all of their website content and so much more. It is also referred to as the wp-admin, WP Admin, and the WordPress Dashboard. Whenever you log on to WordPress, you will be taken directly to the Dashboard section of the WP-admin, which you will see immediately after you log in. In the WP-admin and main Dashboard section, you will also see a mostly dark gray bar at the very top, the admin bar or top bar, and it contains features such as a rollover drop-down menu that’s triggered by hovering over the WordPress logo in the top left corner, A link to the front page of your WordPress website (the clickable house icon), an updates and activity section that contains either pending updates or links to the newest comments, A rollover drop-down menu with handy links to New Post, New Media, New Page, and New User, triggered by hovering over the plus icon, and your user-linked to your profile, located on the far right and is another drop-down menu containing a link labeled Edit My Profile and another link to log out (labeled Log Out). On the left side of the screen, there is the main menu, where you can click on any word in the menu to be taken to the dedicated page for that section, or you can hover over your cursor over a given link to see all of the possible subsections you can visit.
- After reading chapter 3 of the textbook, I have learned three new things about blogs and how to create them:
- The block-based editor – an editor that is called by that name because of the way it handles content and manages their structure – is the area where you can make your content, preview it, or publish it on your blog. The content that you have within your posts or pages is divided into individual blocks, one below the other, all neatly arranged on a digital canvas.
- Before the block-based editor came to be, WordPress used a traditional editor of the “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” kind, using a classic paragraph-based structure that is akin to how one would build a document in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. However, such a traditional structure like that is simply not well-suited to handle the modern content requirements of the web, which made it difficult to build elaborate, visually pleasing blog posts or pages and effectively present them on different devices.
- There are two types of information that the user can add to a blog post: categories and tags. Categories are primarily used for structural organization, and they can be hierarchical, meaning that a category can be a parent of another category. For example, if you were to make a category named “Literature” in a blog that is focused on books, you can make child categories such as “Mystery”, “Science Fiction”, and “Thriller”, but you can make and assign as many categories as you please. On the other hand, tags are primarily used as shorthand for describing the topics covered in a particular blog post. For example, a post about Final Fantasy XV on a video game blog can have tags such as “action”, “adventure”, “role-playing”, “Japanese role-playing game”, and “open-world”. Again, much like categories, you can create and assign as many tags as you want.
- “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.” – Mahatma Gandhi
The above gallery consists of three of my favorite albums of all time: “Plastic Beach” by Gorillaz, “In Rainbows” by Radiohead, and “Give Up” by The Postal Service. I decided to do this gallery for an assignment that involves working with WordPress’s Media Library as a demonstration on adding a gallery of images to a post.