WordPress: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 6: Making Fancier Posts

You know what a basic WordPress post looks like—it starts with a title, followed by one or more paragraphs of text. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you pick a good theme, your WordPress site can look great, even if it holds nothing more than plain-text content.

However, there are plenty of good reasons to make fancier posts with more formatting. For example, long posts are easier to read if you break up your text with subheadings and spacers. Pictures, lists, links, and pull quotes can transform your writing from a drab wall of text to a professional product, whether you’re making a chatty blog or a buttoned-down business site. To add details like these, you need to take charge of WordPress’s post editor. You’ll learn how to do that in this chapter.

Simple Text Formatting

Before you plunge deep into the world of WordPress formatting, it’s worth taking a quick look at a few simple styling tricks you’ll use every day. These are basic formatting touches, like applying bold and italics. WordPress scatters these settings in a few places, so it’s easy to lose track of them when you’re starting out.

If it’s not already obvious, all of these tricks and techniques happen in the post editor. So before you continue to the next section, start with the standard Post→Add New command to create a new post. That way, you have somewhere to test out these techniques.

Note The exact appearance of the post editor depends on your theme. That doesn’t mean the ...