The difference between a post and a page can be pretty confusing. Here's the breakdown:
While a page can be assigned a parent item, a post is based on categories.
Posts are more flexible than pages and can be pushed into different areas of your site. More on that below. You may be familiar with RSS feeds — those are from posts, like a blog.
A post is used most often for news and upcoming event items, but can also be used for writing on subjects. These web tutorials, for example, are all posts.
The actual post editor looks basically the same as a page editor. You can use the same shortcodes, slideshows, forms, etc.
Creating a Post
There are a few important additional fields with a post, here ranked in order of importance:
A. Categories — This will place your post in a feed, and is the most important step. You should already have a news category. If you want to add a different category, just click "add new category" or go to "categories" under Posts on the left hand side.
B. Featured image — We've designed our feeds to show a photo along with the post title and excerpt. This photo should be landscape, about 900 px wide, and will be cropped to 16 x 9 dimensions if it's not already. Click "Set Featured Image" to add this photo, and upload an image.
C. Excerpt — We put the excerpt in the Post Slider; it's just a summary of your post and entices people to keep reading.
D. Tags — Tags are keywords or subject headings for your post and describe the content. Although we don't incorporate tags in our theme at this point, you can use tags in the "tag cloud" widget.
Publishing Posts
Now that you've published a post, where does it go? There are several options.
Use the "Display Posts" shortcode to pull a specific number of posts from selected categories onto a page (or post or widget, for that matter). The featured image and first few lines will appear. You can adjust the order of posts, dictate how many should appear, and show or hide the date.
The shortcode will look like this: [wagner-posts numofposts="2" sentences="2" posts_orderby="title" posts_orderin="asc" specific_category=",web-group" show_posted_date="no" ]
Once you publish, it will display like this:
Our public campus calendar pulls events from our internal scheduling system. If your event is open to the wider campus community or the general public, follow these steps: 1. Log into schedule.wagner.edu with your all-access username and password. 2. Select admin/staff/faculty or registered student organization. 3. Check off "publish on wagner.edu" and fill out the category and […]
Please refer to our in-depth tutorial on post sliders. You can put the post slider on any page (or post), and it will appear below the main menu and above your site menu and site content. This is a great way to feature news and stories about faculty and students.
You can also pull a category feed into a widget using the "Advanced Recent Posts" widget. That will display the most recent posts along with the featured image. If you have a lot of categories (like the newsroom), you could use the "Categories" widget, which will display a dropdown list of your categories.
At the bottom of every post, you will see something like "Posted in Web Group on Nov. 19, 2012." If you click the link to that category (like Web Group), you will see a list of all your posts in that category. You can share that link with others, use it as a hyperlink on your page, or even add it to your main menu.
You can pull a feed from any category from any site using the "RSS" widget. The URL for my Web Group category is http://wagner.edu/communications/category/web-group/feed. Follow the same formula to find the correct URL: http://wagner.edu/yoursite/category/category-name/feed.
