Categories and Layout

There are two important aspects to your blog post besides its content – categories and layout.

On the right sidebar, you will find a list of Categories. Select the category that best applies to your blog post. You can select more than one category. This helps others find your blog post among all the other posts on the web site.

On the right sidebar, you will find a section titled Format. Generally, the Standard format works best with most blog posts. However, feel free to experiment with the other formats. Formats such as Aside, Link, Quote and Status are meant for one-liner blog posts and do not show any title. These are of limited use.

Below the text editor area, you will see a section titled Additional Options for Suffusion. If you select Layout, you will have the option of changing the layout of your blog post by choosing how many sidebars to show. The only usable selections for the SVWM web site are: Default, 0 (Zero) and 1 Right. If you have a particularly wide page layout, 0 (Zero) would be the best choice. Otherwise, leave this at Default to show the normal right sidebar.

Editors

There are two editors available to edit a blog post–Visual and HTML.

The Visual editor is the one you will normally use to create and edit your blog posts. It provides features much like a word processor and displays your content in more-or-less WYSIWIG format. Please remember that text editing on the Internet has its limitations! What you see in the editor is not what your blog post will look like on the web site. This is because the web site will automatically format the blog post according the WordPress theme in use.

The best way to approach a blog post is to enter in all your text first, including section headings, with simple paragraph separation. Then you can format the text using the features on the editor toolbar. See the Blog Editing How To page for several how-to articles on using the Visual editor. The final touch would be to add any media such as images and video. If you hover your mouse pointer above an icon on the editor toolbar, you will see what it does. Some are obvious and others not so much. You can be quite creative but remember that being too creative can be distracting and reduce the readability of your post.

When you have your page like you think it will look good, click the Publish or Update button on the right sidebar, then click the View Post link near the top of the page. This will display your post how it will look on the web site. Click the Edit link in the upper right corner of your post to return to the editor. Make any adjustments in the editor and click Update again to save the page. Press View Post again to see how it looks. When it is looking good, you are done.

As the name suggests, the HTML editor allows you to edit your content in HTML mode. You will be able to see all the HTML markup tags that make up your post. You will not see the content in WYSIWYG format. If you know HTML markup, you might want to fine-tune your content in HTML. For most people though, the HTML editor is not very useful.