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7 Little Known WordPress Features

Whether you’re new to WordPress, or an old pro, there’s some hidden gems in WordPress that you might not be aware of.

1. Easily Embed a Tweet

Did you know you can embed a tweet just by pasting the url into your page editor?

To get the status url of a single tweet, go to twitter.com and find the tweet you want to embed. Click on the tweet to expand it, then click the “details” link.

tweet-details

Copy the url in your browser, then paste it into your page/post editor.

Twitter Embed

2. Easily Embed a YouTube Video

Similar to the tweet embed, WordPress lets you paste in a simple YouTube url without fussing over embed codes.

Simply go to the video you want to use on youtube.com, and copy the url in your browser.

WordPress YouTube embed

In this case, the url is:

1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmOyxceYAO4&feature=plcp

Here’s what it looks like:

3. Reorder Posts by Date

WordPress automatically orders your posts by date, newest on top. What if you want to switch the order around a little bit?

Without using a plugin, here’s a quick and simple way to reorder your posts. Just change the date!

Click on Posts in your admin area, then go to the post you want to move. Click on “Quick Edit” under the post title.

Quick Edit

You will then see this (below), and you can change the post date. Just change the post to be more recent if you want it higher up in your post order, or less recent to do the opposite.

Post Date Change

4. Fullscreen Editor

The standard page/post editor in WordPress is full of links, buttons, and meta boxes. If you want to get rid of all that and just focus on writing, the fullscreen editor is for you.

It removes all of the extra stuff, and just lets you focus on your content.

To enable the fullscreen editor, just go to a post/page edit screen, and click the fullscreen button.

Fullscreen editor button

The result is a totally immersive writing experience, with no distractions.

Fullscreen editing

Give it a try! You’ll love it.

5. Visual Editor Features

The visual editor has some great features you might have missed.

Obviously you can bold, italicize, and change the color of text. But did you know you can check your spelling, paste as plain text, and remove unwanted formatting?

The Kitchen Sink

First, make sure you press the kitchen sink button to show the extra row of buttons in the visual editor.

WordPress kitchen sink button

Spellcheck

WordPress Spellcheck

Press this button to spellcheck your document.

Paste as plain text, and paste from Word

If you do a lot of copy/pasting, these buttons will come in handy. If you copied some text, and you want to paste it without bringing along the colors, fonts, and other formatting, use the paste as plain text button. This will make the text you paste match the rest of your document.

WordPress paste as plain text

If you are copying from Word, you can use the button right next to the button above to paste. It doesn’t work perfectly, but give it a try.

Remove formatting

If you paste something and it doesn’t come out right, or your document is looking a little rough, you can use this button.

Remove Formatting

This will remove unwanted formatting, without stripping proper tags like <h2>. (Make sure to highlight the text you want to edit, then press the button.)

6. Pagination

Want to break your post up into multiple pages? No problem.

Switch to Text mode in your page/post editor (the tab at the top right), and add this code:

<!--nextpage-->

Depending on your theme, you should see page numbers at the bottom of your post sort of like this:

1 2

7. The Read More Button

We get this question ALL the time in our support forums, so it’s worth a mention here.

Read More

The read more button allows you to cut off your post and force readers to click “Read More” to see the rest of the post. This is handy for blog pages with multiple posts, where you don’t want each post to be displayed at full length.

To cut off your post and add a read more button, just place your cursor where you want it to appear, and click this button (in Visual mode).

read-more-btn

If you are in Text mode, you can add this code:

<!--more-->

That’s all for now, I hope you learned something! If you have any other tips I missed, please add them in the comments.

14 Responses to 7 Little Known WordPress Features

  1. Ozh says:

    You can also customize the “Read more” text: <!–more But wait, there’s more! –>

  2. Ori says:

    All good ideas. But, about changing the date on your posts to reorder them, won’t this end up as 404 errors for anyone coming in from search engine results?

  3. Change the date on all your posts? What if you have a few and want to re-order them all? What a silly suggestion!

    Firstly if you have a custom theme you can modify the loop (whichever method you have used to query your posts). Secondly there are loads of plugins which allow you to do it.

    Above, with the 404 page that will only happen if the permalinks have been set to include the date. If you change it then the link will no longer point to the page.

    Again, just changing the date of the post is a really bad idea.

    • David says:

      I think you are missing the point here. We don’t say anywhere that you should start changing the date on all your posts (unless of course you have nothing better to do)! If you want to reorder bulk posts then obviously go get a shiny Plugin to do it for you.

      However, to reorder just one or two posts then editing the publication date is a safe and valid way of doing so. It WON’T break your site. If you have custom permalinks which include the date, then a quick visit to the permalinks page will flush those nasty old rewrite rules away like magic.

      Also, I would like to bet money that new WordPress users would prefer to update the publication settings than dive into editing the theme post loop, or sourcing/installing/activating/configuring a Plugin to just reorder a couple of posts! Talk about overkill. :)

  4. SJ says:

    Actually, I help manage 2 soap opera star websites with archives of magazine articles dating as far back as the late 1980’s. It was important to us to have the articles appear in the order they were published in the magazines.

    With dozens of articles to add, and more than one person contributing, it would have been a nightmare to try to add them in the exact order they were written. So, as we added them, we changed their dates to match the original dates of publication.

    Both sites work fine and that approach saved us a ton of work.

  5. Ori says:

    David said: “If you have custom permalinks which include the date, then a quick visit to the permalinks page will flush those nasty old rewrite rules away like magic.”

    Yes, I was referring to posts that have the date as a part of the permalink. Thanks for the how-to.

  6. bungeshea says:

    I think that it is worth mentioning that the spellcheck function of the visual ediror is not built into WordPress, rather it is supplied by the After the Deadline plugin, or the Spelling and Grammer module in the Jetpack plugin.

    • Scott says:

      Actually WordPress has a simple spell check built in to TinyMCE, it just underlines misspelled words. But that’s a good point, After the Deadline (which is now part of Jetpack) is a better one.

  7. Rick Rouse says:

    I can vouch for reordering posts by changing the dates. I’ve been doing it for years on al of my blogs with no ill effects. In my opinion, plugins should be used sparingly and only when there isn’t an efficient way to complete a task without them.

  8. The best plugin that I found for re-ordering posts by drag and drop of any type incl. CPTs is: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-types-order/

  9. James says:

    No. 2 doesn’t work. All you get is a link to Youtube. Which is fine if you just want to post links