Business Blogging

The visual editor provides a semi-WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) content editor that allows you to easily create, edit and format your blog content in a view similar to that of a word processor.

This is the default editing mode of WordPress.com, but if it does not appear to be enabled, you can select the Visual tab in the top right corner of the editor area, as depicted below.

There are two (2) rows of editing icons contained within the visual editor. You can find out what any icon means or does by hovering over it with your mouse – a small tooltip will appear describing the icon and its purpose.

Row 1

When initially opened, the visual editor will display a single row of icons:

1. Bold
2. Italic
3. Strike-through
4. Unordered list (bullet points):
   • Item 1
   • Item 2
5. Ordered list
   • Item 1
   • Item 2
6. Blockquote (a way of displaying quoted text; each theme will style this differently.)

   Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

7. Align Left
8. Align Center
9. Align Right
10. Insert/edit link
11. Unlink
12. Insert More tag
13. Toggle spellchecker (only English at the moment, sorry!)
14. Toggle fullscreen mode
15. Show/Hide Kitchen sink (enables the second row of editing icons:

Row 2

To display the second row of icons, select the kitchen sink icon

1. Style – various formatting styles defined by your theme
2. Underline
3. Align full
4. Select text color – change the text color
5. Paste as Plain Text
6. Paste from Word
7. Remove formatting
8. Insert custom character
9. Outdent – move text further left
10. Indent – move text further right
11. Undo – undo your last action
12. Redo – redo your last action
13. Help – display some information about using the editor, as well as keyboard shortcuts.

Alignment

Both text and images can be aligned using the appropriate icons:

Left

Right

Center

Full

Note that full alignment can only be applied to text and will align both sides of the text.

Styles

The style drop-down menu allows you to change the formatting of any selected text. This includes various headings and other pre-defined styles built into your theme . Note that all styles are defined within your theme’s stylesheet; this means that their modification would require the Custom CSS Upgrade (and appropriate knowledge of CSS).

Text Color

To change text color you must first highlight a section of text:

Selecting a color will apply that color to the selected text and make it the default color for the color button.

Clicking on the text color button itself will apply the last default color.

Pasting Text

If you copy and paste text from somewhere else you may discover that it does not always appear exactly as you would expect. If you use the Paste as text button then a special cleanup process will run to remove any special formatting and HTML tags that may otherwise change your text.

Once clicked a window appears where you can enter your text:

Checking the keep linebreaks box will preserve all HTML <br /> tags. Unchecking this option will remove them

Remove Formatting

The remove formatting button, as you would expect, removes all formatting (bold, italic, colors etc) from a highlighted section of text. First select your text:

When the button is clicked all the formatting will be removed:

Custom Characters

As well as the normal letters available directly from your keyboard you can also insert special characters. Position your cursor to where you want to insert a character and click on the insert custom character button. A popup window will appear:

Click any character and it will be inserted at your cursor position.

Outdent / Indent

The indent button will move text in by one level, and the outdent button will take away one level.

WordPress.com is a type of shared environment, where all users are running off of the same software. This is great because it allows us at Automattic to update millions of blogs at the same time with a single click. It means we can fix bugs or offer new features very quickly, which is a win for you as users. Having all users running on the same software can also be dangerous. If we aren’t careful, one user has the potential to take down the entire site. So this is why we need to limit some of the things you post on your blog.

If you wrote some code or pasted it in from another web site and then it disappeared after publishing the post, the code is likely being stripped out. If you feel it’s being stripped out improperly or if you would like to suggest additional types of code we should allow, please contact support.

HTML Tags

WordPress.com allows the following HTML code in your posts, pages, and widgets:

address, a, abbr, acronym, area, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, cite, class, code, col, del, dd, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, img, ins, kbd, li, map, ol, p, pre, q, s, span, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, tr, tt, ul, var

Check out W3 Schools for more information about what each of these HTML codes are used for.

If you are familiar with HTML, you’ll notice that codes such as embed, frame, iframe, form, input, object, textarea and others are missing from the above list. Those codes are not allowed on WordPress.com for security reasons.

Javascript

Users are not allowed to post JavaScript on WordPress.com blogs. Javascript can be used for malicious purposes. Your code and intentions may be perfectly harmless, but it does not mean all javascript will be okay. The security of all the blogs is a top priority and until we can guarantee scripting languages will not be harmful they will not be permitted.

If you need proof of what Javascript can do, it has taken both MySpace.com and LiveJournal offline in the past.

You may want a bit of Javascript and it may well be harmless but as soon as the system allows it someone will try and exploit it.

JavaScript from trusted partners, such as YouTube and Google Video, is converted into a WordPress shortcode when a post is saved.

Flash and Other Embeds

Flash and all other embeds are not allowed in WordPress.com posts, pages, or text widgets. For security reasons we remove the tags needed for these to work. Your intentions may be innocent but someone somewhere would try to damage the site, affecting all of our users.

There are several safe ways to post Videos, Audio, and other items to your WordPress.com blog.

Posting Source Code

See our Posting Source Code article for details on how to easily post source code on your blog.

There are several different ways to split content in your blog posts and pages

• The More Tag
• NextPage
• Page Jumps
• Excerpts

The More Tag

You can split the posts of your blog so that only the first part of the post is displayed on the home and archive (monthly, category, etc…) views. When you do this, a link will be placed directly after your excerpt, pointing the reader to the full content of the article.

You can find the insert More tag button in the first row of the visual editor toolbar or by pressing Alt+Shift+T:

Using the More tag

1) Go to Posts -> Add New in your dashboard to create a new blog entry (this does not work with Pages).

2) Begin writing your post. When you decide that you want to cut it off, you can insert the More tag to effectively split the post (mark where the excerpt officially ends). You will see, in the visual editor, the More tag as such:

3) Finish writing your post.

4) Publish the post and view the front page of your blog. You should see your post effectively split using the More tag. Click on the link, and you will be taken to the post in its full form. The front page of your blog should display the post similar to:

But wait, there’s more!

You can further customize the message that displays in the link to the full post content.

You will need to do this in the HTML view of your editor. Once you are change to the HTML editor, look for this code:

<!–more–>

Custom “Read More” Message

To customize the message, simply add a space after <!–more, and turn it into something like this…

<!–more But wait, there’s more–>

The front page of your blog should now display your post as such:

Note: You will need to customize the message for each post; you cannot declare a global message that will take effect on each and every post of your blog that uses the More tag.

Formatting Issues

If the More tag is inserted after writing a post, formatting errors can occur. The issue occurs when you insert the More tag using the visual editor, but it is actually placed within another HTML tag. As an example:

<strong>Oh man, this post is messed up.<!–more–></strong>

The above will cause the rest of the posts on your front page (or in an archive) to be formatted as bold, sometimes including your sidebar contents. Not cool. It can also make the sidebar fall to the bottom of the page. To fix the issue, just place the More tag on the outside of any pesky, closing HTML tags, like so:

<strong>Oh man, this post is messed up.</strong><!–more–>

Make sure to go into the HTML view of the problematic post and move your More tag to outside of any HTML tags (this includes div, strong, em, etc…).

Note: Copying and pasting content from rich text editors such as Microsoft Word often causes problems because a lot of extra HTML is used that can interfere with the More tag. Consider using a plain text editor, such as Notepad, instead or use the Paste from Word button.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this VideoPress video. return to top

NextPage (Pagination)

Did you know you could split a post/page up into different web pages so that is has pagination? All you have to do is type:

<!–nextpage–>

into the HTML editor where you would like your page splits to appear.

You can use it throughout a long post to make two, three, four, or more pages out of the single post. When you view your post on your site, the multi-page links appear as links at the bottom. The links below are an example of the feature in action.

Page Jumps

Page jumping is where you click a link and instantly get moved somewhere further up or down a long page. Try it:

CLICK HERE TO JUMP

Why use Page Jumps?

You might have a list of items at the top of the post and using these jump links means you can allow someone to jump straight to a place rather than scrolling down and looking. You could also use it to make a post jump all over the place is you wanted. return to top

Create a Page Jump

The link starts it (the ‘Click me’) is written like this:

<a href=”#unique-identifier”>Click me</a>

Note the #

The link where that goes to is written like this:

<a name=”unique-identifier”>See?</a>

The #unique-identifier matches the name=”unique-identifier”.

So you could have <a href=”#another-identifier”>Jump 2</a> to <a name=”another-identifier”>Place 2</a>

At the beginning of the post or page, add this before all of the other HTML:

<a name=”top”></a>

and anywhere you want a link to zoom them to the top of the page, you put this:

<a href=”#top”>top</a>

Okay, now jump back to the top. return to top

Excerpts

Excerpts are summaries of a blog posts that are shown in feeds and possibly on the home and archives pages, depending on the blog’s theme. When you use an excerpt, an automatic link will be placed directly after it pointing the reader to the full content of the post. When creating a new post or editing an existing post, you can use the Excerpt module to create one.

Note that only some themes utilize the excerpt feature. If your theme does not support excerpts, you can still split post contents into summaries using the MORE tag. return to top

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Problems

Microsoft Word is a fine word processor for producing documents to be shared or printed, with a wealth of print-based options for indexing, and producing table of contents. As a web publishing tool it is a little less than ideal and produces very messy HTML. The same applies when using OpenOffice, or other word processors.

When text is pasted it initially looks fine:

But looking at the HTML code you can see that it is full of additional tagging information.

The more you edit this post the worse the situation gets. Should a problem occur you will then be faced with a lot of work trying to figure out what has happened and how to fix it. The same code above can be written a lot more cleanly using the WordPress visual editor:

Using Word Cleanly

If you decide that you still want to use Word then you should use the Word cleanup feature to remove all extraneous tags from your text. From the visual editor click on the show kitchen sink button:

Then click on the paste Word button:

A window will appear where you can insert your Word content.

When satisfied you can then click insert and it will clean the content and insert it into your post. Note that all your formatting will be removed so any styles will need to be added in afterwards.

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There are very key differences between posts and pages in your WordPress blog.

Posts

Posts are listed in reverse chronological order on the blog home page or on the posts page if you have set one in Settings > Reading. If you have created any sticky posts, those will appear before the other posts. Posts can be found in the Archives, Categories, Recent Posts, and other widgets. Posts are also displayed in the RSS feed of the blog. You can control how many posts are displayed at a time in the Reading Settings. The URL for a post includes the date the post was published like this: http://blogname.com/2008/11/30/post-title/

For search engine optimization purposes, we take out the date feature of your blog post.  Not using the date in the url gives your blog posting a strong url name that is keyword sensitive and search engine friendly.  The default url name will be the title of your blog posting: so you should put some thought in to the blog post titles you use–are they keywords people are searching for?

Pages

Pages are static and are not listed by date. Pages do not use tags or categories. An ‘About’ page is the classic example. Pages are displayed in the sidebar using the Pages widget, and some themes display pages in tabs at the top of the blog. If you have 50 pages and you use the Pages widget, then all pages will be listed all the time. The URL for a page looks like this: http://blogname.com/page-title/

How many can I have?

There is no limit on the number of posts or pages you can have.

How do I post to a Page?

It’s not possible to “post” to a page; pages are static entities that only can be edited. Consider using posts and categories instead if you are using pages for several different subjects.

Posts (or articles) are the search engine magnets that (more often than not) will bring new visitors to your website.  The posts on your website are organized by choosing the appropriate category, series and/or tag.  The two videos below teach you how to navigate the blog article editing screen.

There are several different ways to create a new post, but here is the method we suggest you use:

Posts > Add New (located in the left dashboard menu)

Writing and publishing a post

The thing you’ll probably be doing most with WordPress – writing and publishing posts – is covered in this short flyby tutorial

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this VideoPress video. Saving and returning to draft posts & pages

If you’d like to save your work and come back to it another time, without putting it out for the world to see, WordPress gives you various draft options. This video talks you through the process.

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