 in progress. All right, this is Get Blogging in 2023. Set up your blog. We're going to tackle this a little differently today than I have in the past. Hello, I'm Sarah Snow. I use she-her. I am a Florida resident by weekday and traveler by weekend when I am lucky enough to do so. I'm a former middle school teacher, so you will see a lot of that today. I am a parent and a sharp hey mom, so you will hear some birds whistling in the background occasionally, and you will definitely hear some dogs barking today, working from home problems. I'm a long-time WordPress user, a former happiness engineer with word, I'm sorry, with automatic, and I'm a training team contributor or med scientist, depending on how it goes, and I'm lucky enough to be sponsored by automatic. So you should be able to find this session or one like it on Learn WordPress for those of you who are joining us for the first time to find that if you had to. The tools are now in the way of my screen. There we go. Learn.wordpress.org. If you scroll down to View All Online Workshops, there is a button here, View Recorded Online Workshops. You can find this in this section here. It will be front and center until new ones pop up. So yeah, it's just a little bit of background there. Just some expectations for today. This is going to be interactive, so please stay curious and respectful. I already had someone ask a wonderful question aloud today, so thank you for that. You can ask aloud or in the chat. Please remember that we are learning together. This also means me. I am learning too, and sometimes things don't go as planned, but as we fumble along, we will also learn things. Please answer each other's questions in the chat box. You'll see Katherine, my co-host, answering some of mine. But if you know the answer to something that I or somebody else has a question about, by all means, we are learning together. Close captioning is also provided, so you are welcome to turn that on for you. And as I said, this session is recorded. All right, let's start with this. How experienced are you with WordPress? One does have one being brand new. You've never used WordPress before. Five is, hey, I've used WordPress before, but maybe I've not used block themes or just not recently. Or 10, I know all the things to know about WordPress. I would probably put myself in a six or a seven. I'm not a developer, but I know some stuff I can meddle here and there without completely breaking things. This helps me figure out which things I need to go more in depth to explain it, which I do not. All right, I'm seeing a lot of sixes, a lot of fives. All right, cool. This is great. All right, then, yeah, that helps. Thank you. All right, no wrong answers here. So let's start by logging in. So we have a temporary 24-hour sandbox that needs a little bit of updating, or you can use your host. I highly recommend using a host of your choice. And I just realized that I cannot send this message because I can't click the button. Why is it doing this, Catherine? Let me try one more thing. No, the button is just off the screen. So, Catherine, if you wanted to copy and paste that into the chat for me. Already done. No problem. I'll keep doing that. Okay. So if you click this link, here's what's going to happen. It's going to apparently open in a different tab. That's weird. There we go. So you'll get a message that says, hey, we're building your sandbox. It'll be available in a few minutes. You're welcome to design here. This will only last for 24 hours. So if you make something beautiful that you are super proud of, know that the clock is ticking. It is a little bit tricky to migrate things. Catherine? I just want to pause. I think it will be better, because I think that link is specific to one instance of the sandbox. I think it would be better if each person had their own sandbox. So I'm just going to find the link for that. I think that each should spin up a different one for each person. Am I wrong? That link has a whole unique string of letters and numbers after it, and it prompted me to check my inbox for an email. You should have gotten to this screen, because you have to click through to say yes, my email is correct. Don't update your email. But each one should, because it says rational falcon, like this is just the random name. If I click it again and it makes a new one, like please don't do this too much. Don't just make endless things, because that does eat into our servers. But it should create a new instance as well. We're going to double check. Okay. Yeah. I thought there was a short link to send people. I'm just looking for it. There was one. I think I'm using the right one. We're going to find out. So just say remind me later. This is not a big deal. We need to update this a little bit, which I did not know. But you'll notice it has a different URL up here, Sparkling Centipede. Perfect. So you should have your own thing now. If you're using ours, you're going to notice a couple of things. Namely, I'll go over here to this one. If you click on updates, we're a little behind. So we'll go ahead and click update to version 6.1. For those of you who are brand new to WordPress, we don't have very many of you. Actually, I don't think we have any of you know to back up your website. Since there's nothing here, it's okay to click update. My best slide plans, Catherine. We're just not going to... Okay. Apparently not that. Is anybody else getting that error? Or is it just me getting the one that says it's scheduled for maintenance? Okay. I'm going to try one more time. I am fine updating to 6.1. My goodness. I'm having a rough time, because I'm going to have to switch to local, y'all. Okay. There we go. All right. And yes, anything I can't go wrong sometimes and often does. All right. Cool. So you should be updated to 6.1. Again, you are totally welcome to do this on a host of your choice as well. It makes it a little easier. But the next thing that we are going to need today is our newest block theme 2023. So if you had two appearance and themes, we're going to click on this add new button and we're going to search for 2023. There it is. I'm going to go ahead. Oh, apparently I already had it. Good day I learned. Anyway, we're going to go ahead and activate this theme because this is our newest one. And then we can add two appearance and editor. All right. Everyone should be at this step here. Please pause me. I'm getting too far ahead of myself. You'll notice that there's not a lot here. Excuse me. There's not a lot here. It's very minimalist, which can be really great if you're super creative or it can be really daunting if you're starting for the very, very first time. So let's start with content versus appearance. Okay. So how to get here? All right. So there is a link in the chat. And it brought you to a, what should I call it, a dashboard of your own. You want to make sure that you have updated WordPress to 6.1. Then the steps are in the chat. You go to appearance, themes, and then you add new for doing the 2023 theme for today. So your content, it does not change when your theme does. Meanwhile, your appearance is the way that your content appears. So your blog's appearance will change with a theme change. So I use the same tools that you are. What was I doing? Theme. So for example, if I activate the 2022 theme, you're going to notice, and this is very elementary, you're going to notice that everything here changed. So the goal of today is for you to be able to start blogging, for you to have your entire website set up so it looks the way that you would like it to. And all you have to do is go and click on posts, add new, and then you can get started blogging today. So today, we are going to do this a little differently. We're not going to dig deeply into how the site editor works or what all of the different buttons are. It's going to be kind of like an I do, you do type of thing. So the first thing we're going to do is set up our blog structure. We're going to build our header with a logo, a site title and navigation. We're going to create a footer. And we'll use a pattern for that. And we're going to set up our main home page structure. And we're going to use FakerPress because it can be pretty tricky to see otherwise. After that, we are going to set some blog content. We're going to create an about page and a contact page using some patterns. And then we're going to do, we're going to set up some categories and tags ahead of time. And then at the end, we will make it pretty. So M's asking, is there anything in 2022 theme to make it worth choosing or should we just use the 2023 theme? That's a great question. So it really just kind of depends on how you feel about it. I would recommend if you are brand new to the site editor and block themes that, where was I? That you use the 2023 theme because that way you can follow along exactly as we're doing it. Oh my gosh, I've got to close one of these. So we want to go to appearance themes. And once again, we want to make sure that we are using the 2023 theme because that way you can do exactly what I do. Now, if you wanted to get bold and brave and you're looking at this like, ah, this isn't, you know, my favorite thing, you're welcome to go to add new. You are welcome to select this block theme button and pick one of your choice, but do know that some patterns won't be available to you. More patterns may be available to you. Like you may not have the same options that I do. Am I still here? Okay. Someone else tried deciding to learn WordPress. Okay. Cool. Just making sure we're still here. The thing about block themes is that it's kind of like driving the fanciest car possible. Like there are lots of fancy cars, very expensive, but all have different features. And some of them have like more bells and whistles than you know what to do with. And some are very minimalist as well. Like that's the beauty of the 2023 theme. So there are a lot of things you can do with them. So we're going to try and keep it simple today. Yeah. Okay. Cool. So this is how we're doing this in the past. I've done this where we've made it pretty first, but we're going to save that time for the end of today, I think, and really just figure out the structure of everything today. So think about it like we are building a picture frame, right? The frame is like where all the, you can kind of, well, that's not going to help. You can kind of, we have to build the frame. We have to have the cutouts for where our content will shine through and then we'll make it pretty at the end. So let's see how we're doing today. And we'll also learn some individual post settings and comments and stuff at the end, just so, again, you are completely ready to get blogging today with a new block theme. So we talked about this fully set up blog and understand post settings so that you can blog into the new year. So before we begin, I think we didn't have anybody who said, hey, I'm super, super brand new to WordPress. So I'm going to skip this tutorial today, just because I think that we're in pretty good hands. But Catherine, if you wanted to copy and paste this link, if you are brand new to block themes, this link that I just sent you may be helpful as you play a little bit on your own later on in the day. All right. So getting set up WordPress plus a block theme. Em says that they had a classic theme and tried to migrate it to a block theme and it was a disaster. Oh no. That happens sometimes. I've moved a couple of things from classic to block themes as well in this process. Hopefully, we'll help you to do that with more confidence in the future. So we're using 2023. We already did that. I'm ahead of myself. Beautiful. Yeah. So we're going to now a two appearance editor if you're not there already. And we're going to look at some of our site tools. So where is that? The first one, global styles is over here. You're going to find that there are usually three places in your site editor or sometimes even a page editor where you can make giant changes. So this is known as your global styles. We're going to do this towards the end. The choices that we make here in this little half moon shaped box will make changes across the entire website. So we're going to do this at the end. We're not going to get too deeply into this yet. We will make it pretty at the end. We also have our settings. So the other place that you're going to find some changes are in your settings. So if you start clicking around in here, you're going to notice that a lot is changing over here on the right. And the settings that you choose here will override things that you put into styles. And again, we're going to get into this towards the end. But it's just good to know that you're there. So again, there's so much here. There's so much that you can do with it. I want you to consider just remember that there are three places where changes can be made to every single block that you see on your site. So that's the second of them. The other one is in these settings up. Not these settings. I don't even actually know what this is called, Catherine. Do you know what this toolbar is officially called? I call it the block toolbar. The block toolbar. I'm not sure if there's another name. I don't know if anybody knows. I can't think of another name, but we're going to call it the block toolbar for today. I like that. But there may be another official name naming things as hard. But you will be able to see different things. So like you can change the alignment of things here, right? This is just a heading tag. I know that because of my list view here, which we'll get into in a second. But with my settings here, I can also make a lot of other changes. So you'll notice that, yeah, those are the three places. So I can make changes here, which in global styles, which apply to the entire site. So for example, I could make a change here. And you'll notice that certain headings are changing here. And that will change across headings across the entire site. I'm not actually sure. Oh, I think it's because I picked a setting here. You can make changes here. And then you can also you'll see them there. So as you're experimenting, as you're playing with this today, just remember three places where changes can be made. Okay, checking that the options and the toolbar change with the type of block. Yes, you're hitting the nail right on the head. They all are a little different. So for example, this is a featured image. You can't see anything here yet. We're going to fix that in just a moment. But I can, and again, you can't actually see it. I'm going to have to back up, but you'll notice that the options that you have on the right and in this block toolbar change as I click on different blocks. So yeah, how did you open the block on the right? I see sample page. Okay, so I think Debbie, you may be in pages. And the, which we call it the page editor block editor looks very, very similar. So if you're ever in a random page like this, and you're like, hey, I don't actually see that half moon icon. This means that you're in your content. You're not in your overall theme. So if you're ever like, okay, where am I need to reorient this w icon? And the top here allows you to go back to your dashboard appearance. Okay, cool. Do you not have template and block? Okay, so this little gear icon here is what opens that. So when you first look at it, you might just, you might not see anything on either side. So to open that up, this gear here that says settings will open that up. Your other big tool here is your list view. Take it from me. If you just like click around, you'll notice that there are certain things that are there are blocks within within blocks, right? So inside this main group block, we have a ton of other blocks. We have a heading block, we have a query loop, which pulls our information. We have some spacers, we have columns. And if you just start clicking around, you may not grab the block that you actually need to grab this list view is your absolute best friend when it comes to full site editing. Okay, so there's a little bit of our tools. You're also going to use today this thing. This is called the inserter. This little plus sign here allows you to insert new blocks. So, for example, let's say after this group, after this group block, I wanted to add something. I press that button, and you'll likely see this screen first with lots and lots of different options. These are all the bells and whistles that come with full site editing. You also have this button patterns, we will get into that in a minute. But these are going to be the tools that you can use to design your site. MS, is it worth creating a group when it is everything? It can be. So I think what you're asking is that like when you're looking at this, right, if I click on my list view here, I have a header, a group, and a footer. I'm running it into what these are in just a minute. But you're looking at it, and it's like, hey, I put every single thing within this group. What is it? You'll notice some settings over here with layout. So I can decide how wide I want something to be. Anything within this group is only going to be 400 pixels wide now. So I think that's the reason. Meanwhile, if I wanted this column to be a little wider, I might move that outside of that group and put it somewhere else. But we're not going to do that yet. But it can be everything or it doesn't have to be. But we're going to reset this because we're actually going to set up our blog today. Any other tools I need to talk to you about? There's list view. There are also, well, so you can insert things with this button here. You can also insert things with these three buttons right here. Insert before and after. These are really powerful to help you figure out what you want to do. So let's say in front of my query loop, I wanted to put something to get really specific rather than just pressing this button. Clicking these three dots and writing insert before allows me to now pick the block that I want. So let's say I wanted an image. I can just put that right there. And that way it is above my query loop here. So those are the tools that we will be using today. And Catherine made a really good point. She says that all the settings in the panel on the right can be applied quickly to everything in the group. It does keep things consistent and it does save time for sure. So there is also an undo button, which is very, very important. If you do something that you didn't mean to, this is your best friend. It's just your control Z. You can see that we put a picture back there. I can go back to the very beginning this way with each editing session. So do keep that in mind. The undo button is also one of my very favorite tools because I make a lot of mistakes, y'all. It's all part of the design process. Okay. That button there, you will notice that there is a W here. This can change if you change your site icon, which I believe we're going to do today. So know that it's this top left-hand button right now. It's a W, but that's how you get to your dashboard, your templates, your template parts. And this is basically your crash course in full-site editing. So if you are brand new to full-site editing, you've used a lot of classic themes in the past. I say this every time I do this, but we have a couple of beautiful courses for you that help you to really get familiar with full-site editing. So I dropped that to Catherine. Please go up and paste that, Catherine. Is there a limit to the undos? I have definitely hit that once upon a time. I don't know what it was, but it might have been like 20 or so. One thing that is really useful, I think, if I can remember where it is, there is a way to reset it all. Oh wait, not at all. Not reset at all. You can reset your global styles. That's what I'm thinking of. So just keep that in mind. Yeah. All right. Let's keep going. We already talked about that. We talked about the list view. I'm just ahead of myself. I make all these slides to make sure that I stay on pace and then I get ahead of myself. Carmen says you can usually reset a page to a previous version once it's published or auto saved. Yes, that is true. I don't actually know that you can do that in the site editor yet, though. There are no revisions in the template editor yet, so that's part of why we're building the structure of our site first today. So if you are doing a post or a page, again, they look really, really similar. There are revisions that you can access, but that is not yet true for the site editor. Oh, James, that's tricky. How to undo a template part change that was made in a previous editing session. My recommendation for that would probably be to get a really good backup plugin. So as you work and as you make changes or whatever, you would make backups between editing sessions. That is probably the only workaround for the time being. Yeah. So we're going to think about templates and template parts today, which are key features of full site editors, a little bit like a picture frame. So the first thing that you'll notice on basically any website, like when we keep just going to WordPress.org and you'll see a similar structure. The first thing is your header. It is what you want to appear on the top of every single page. So if we break down the WordPress.org page, we've got a couple of things here. We've got a little tiny logo up here. We've got our navigation. We have a search bar and we have a get WordPress. And this is going to appear, this header or one like it, because you can't have multiple headers. We're going to stick with one today, but you'll notice that that has stayed the same on every single thing. Then at the bottom of almost all websites, there's a footer and this usually has things like your contact information, social media links, copyright and more. And that also appears at the bottom of every single page. So you can see we've got a big old list of links down here, some linked to different places. But if you're within WordPress.org, you should see a similar header at the bottom of every single page. So we think about templates as our picture frame today. So you can see our logo, there's a code as poetry, text here, social media, all of that stuff. Sometimes you might have sidebars. These are optional. You can do those with columns. And then your content is what peeks through here. So we're going to set up the structure here. We're going to set up the structure here. I'm going to close unnecessary links, so I stop getting lost. Your pages and your posts are the things that can shine through in the center of the picture frame here. So that is why we're going to do this the way that we are today, create our header, create our footer, figure out how we want our picture frame to look. And then that way, anything that you write will shine through here. Let's see. Catherine made a really good suggestion of that. There's a new plugin called create block theme, which she drops into the chat. This plugin not only allows you to create a custom theme of your own, but it also allows you to make copies of your templates. And the other thing that you can do, if you're like, hey, I really need to make sure that I have good backups if you're not using a plugin, the editor also allows you to export your whole theme. And that will make a copy of your theme as it exists here, which you can then install. Let's say I completely mess up my theme, which I have done on multiple occasions, just because it's part of the process, and I need to get back to this specific screen, I can go and use that export. So you can download your theme with your updated templates and styles, and then it will go back to that version. So just something to consider. Let's see. How did I put this sidebar in? That was these three buttons over here. These are our options. These allow us to do several things. They allow us to switch between the visual editor, which is super simple. Or if you are fancy, you could do code that way, but highly recommend we use visual. Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff here. I actually don't use this very often. So it's just something to be aware of. And yeah, M's right. You can copy and you can save this chat today. But thank you for saying, hey, Sarah, go a little fast. I'm doing things that's totally fine too. So thank you very much for that feedback. Okay. So before you start, you want to consider what features you want in each element of your website. Your header, your footer, maybe your sidebar. Having a good idea of what that looks like in your brain is a good idea. So we're going to build now. We're going to create a site structure. Yeah. So we're going to build our picture frame. And then we're going to do something. Let me back up. Let's start by building our picture frame. So we're going to use, not our list view. One of the things that's really, really tricky about full site editing is that it's very easy to make a change in your first template. So when you first go into appearance editor and you start clicking around, if you're not using your list view, if you're just clicking around, you might accidentally work on, like, make changes to your header or your footer and they might apply to the entire website. So a really good best practice, if you're just getting started out, is to go and work on your picture frame piece by piece with your template parts. So please click this W icon up here in the upper left hand corner and click on template parts. So you'll notice that the 2023 theme has a header and a footer. It also has comments and post-meta. I don't know what those are right now. Every block theme has different template parts, but we're going to start with our header. So now you'll notice that I'm just looking at what's going to appear at the very, very top of my page. So whatever is going to be on every single page at the tippy top. So I promised you that we would add a site logo. And if I click my list view here, that appears here as well. Looks like this is in a group. So you want to click, when you first click this, if you're like, hey, there's more here, these, they're probably buried in a group and a row. So this row allows me to put things side by side. So you kind of everything that can go wrong is going wrong today, isn't it? Why is it doing that to me? What just happened? All right, we're gonna try this again. Nope, it's still just a high pressed button, y'all. All right, I'm going to open up my local and do that way. I have a backup. It's going to be fine. We're in the same spot. All good. Appearance editor. Sometimes, y'all, and that, that was something I did with my mouse, but I have no idea how to fix it. So if you're not using a smart mouse, you're not going to have that problem just so you're aware. All right, template parts, header. Okay, so we have a couple of options here. We can say, hey, I want to put my site logo maybe to the left of my site title. So I'm going to use these three dots here, and I'm going to say insert before because that's going to move it over here. And I can either press this button up here or I can type slash. There are so many ways to do the same thing for simplicity. We'll do this. You could add your site logo here. Or, because you might be looking at the saying, hey, this is pretty simple. You might be looking at the saying, hey, this is pretty far to the center. So if you like the look of this great, if you're like me and you're like, oh, I don't know about this structure. You can do this a different way as well. So one thing that I like to do, which is kind of living dangerously, is I click these three dots. I click remove group. I know dangerous. Again, we can always undo it later. So keep that in mind. But we also have what is known as patterns. And we've got several different options for our headers here. These are all different types of headers that you can use. And they allow you to decide what you, you know, what you want it to look like. And they're pre-made, right? So some of them are super big, right? So you can see this one here is enormous. And while that might be fun on certain pages, you probably don't want something like this across the top of every single page of yours, right? So definitely keep that in mind as you do that. I'm going to click my handy dandy back button. I'm going to click my block inserter. I will now click on patterns. I'm going to select headers here. And I'm going to scroll down to something that is a little bit simpler. I really like the simple header with dark background because I can see it looks like it's got maybe a logo, looks like it has a title and some navigation here. So now I'm going to look at what it does full screen. Beautiful. Now, if I look at this, yep, it's all nested in these groups. I've got my site logo, my site title, and then we'll figure this out in a minute. But to add your site logo, click this button here that will bring you to your media library. And from here, you can select the logo that you would like. Now, if you did not come with a logo, that's okay. I highly recommend. You can either use openverse. There are lots of images that you can use that are open source. So a lot of times you have to attribute where you got an image from. Or you can also use pixabay, which is one that I use quite a bit. If I can type pixabay.com. This, a lot of these allow you to find very simple things. So I'm going to use, I really like this one right here. No attribution, free to use under the pixabay license. You can read the pixabay license on your own, but generally you are allowed to use whatever images you find here. So that's really nice. So I'm just going to save this image. Sarah, would you mind showing again where to add the logo block? Yes, I would be delighted. So if you're adding it on your own, so if you're adding it on your own, see how far back we can go. The way that I added it up here was I use my list view. I opened up my group. I have my site title here. I select these three dots. I can insert it before or after. Maybe I want my logo in the center. So you'll notice that this appears here now. I can either press this plus sign, which is the same thing as this. And then the search bar lets me type in logo. And now I have a site logo. Your other option, if you're looking at this and you're like, this isn't really my style yet. Your other option is to remove this group entirely. Press this plus sign here again, our Inserter. Scooch on over to Patterns. Select a header. And then scroll down until you find one that speaks to you. So here's another one, centered header with logo. You can see I've got, I really like to group this together. I've got my site logo, my site title, and my navigation. So I think I downloaded a picture to remember. Oh yeah, there it was. I'm going to use, this is my logo today. Now one thing that you definitely want to do anytime you upload a picture is write your alternative text here. This explains to anyone who is using a screen reader or if you're like me in Florida and you have no cell phone internet ever, it explains what the image is. So the goal is if you couldn't see this image, if it had to be allowed to, you'd want to describe it. So for example, if your phone number or something was on there, you might be like, okay, so this is the logo of Sarah's company. And let's say it had the phone number on it. The logo of Sarah's company in the shape of a compass. This is really, really good to do, not just for accessibility, but for search engines. Search engines can figure out what your images look like a lot better and they figure out how relevant it is to people as well. So I'm going to select that and you can see beautiful. I now have a site logo on my website. I'm going to pause here and look at the chat. Okay. Where is that logo? I already did that already. So M says to allow you to nest other HTML in the header block inside of an H2 heading. Yeah, I think that would be really, okay. So M, you're asking a really good question and the reason that you're asking it I think is because of accessibility. So we're actually going to cover this today. One thing with screen readers is they need to be able to skip to the main content of a website in order to be able to read it faster. So I think M's concern is that they don't want someone who's using a screen reader to have to go through every single button or every single image that isn't necessarily relevant to somebody. So there is a way to set in our main content a way to skip to it. And we will do that. Do not let me forget. It's very important for accessibility. We will do that soon. And Katherine is saying, hey, the header is wrapped in a header tag and the footer is also wrapped in a footer tag as well. So that is one of the things that's really nice. So back in the old days of the internet, when you had to code things by hand, you had to write code in a very specific way to make sure that things were accessible. WordPress is going to do a lot of that for you automatically already with that. So really good points, Katherine. All right. So we should have our header done at this point. So let's head back. I'm going to just look back at our main, or which one it is, just any template. You'll notice that the changes that I made here have now been applied to every single template across the website. So again, use your list view here. It is also possible to edit that header right here. So if I open this up and make changes here, it is possible to make a change that ripples across the entire website. So you'll know it's a header because it's held within this header block here. So that's just something to keep in mind. Next, let's go look at our footer. So right now our footer looks like this. Once again, it's a really good practice to make sure you're only editing those under template parts. So I've clicked on my W icon. I'm clicking on template parts, and now I am heading to my footer. So right now it's pretty simple. You can add all kinds of stuff here. I don't think I want to do that. So when I type in footer, you'll notice several patterns show up here that you can definitely play with. It's also possible to nest a template part within a template part, which is kind of wild. But I highly recommend right now that you use your list view and you can either play with this, open up your group here. You can add things to the left to the right, maybe next to this site title. Maybe you want some social media links. I'm going to click on my three dots, click and start after. We have all kinds of social icons that we can add here. So we've got WordPress that we can add. We can have, maybe not on Instagram. Am I clicking on the wrong thing? Nope. Okay, so that's what just happened. So you'll notice that I was in this WordPress tab, and it didn't want to let me do the right thing. So again, it didn't want to let me add something. So by clicking back on social icon saying, hey, I want to add another social icon, I can select different ones. So that's another thing that you'll notice is that if you find that you're not able to do something you expect to be able to do, make sure that you're on the right block here. So the other option that you have here right now, you can remove this whole group. You can click this plus sign here, click this pattern and select footers. I really like pretty simple footers. That's something that I think we just had a footer with a site title and a credit line. This one seems kind of nice here. I really like this one. This footer is the centered footer with social links. Has an Instagram and a Twitter one. I'm going to open this up again. I think I might want to center this stack. We're going to try. Oh, can I center this? I don't know. So you'll notice that I'm using this here to play with it. Okay. And that did the trick. I might also be able to, oh, hey, look, some of those are here as well. It looks like I can also stylize how this works here. I can add a border just around this. Like you've got a lot of different options here. So take a minute to just kind of play with this and get it the way that you would like. I think I'm going to remove the site tag line. And when I'm done, I'm going to save. And now if I head back to my templates, you can see it down here. So Debbie, you're asking, hey, which footer did I choose? I apparently jumped out of my thing. Let's try this again. The footer that I chose does not have a name here. So I'm just going to remove the whole thing again. I'm going to select patterns, footers. And the one that I selected for myself was the centered footer with social links, just because it's nice and simple. I really like the way that that looks for my own personal preferences. And then I also wanted to move this so that it was more in the center. So I had two ways that I could do it. I could justify it over here under my settings. Looks like that is also here. Remove the site tag line for myself just because I just don't want that there. Okay. So we're starting to see our structure. Now let's head back to our templates. Give me two seconds while I look at this. I just realized that I'm not sure which templates you see. Okay. So it's going to be the index, I think. All right. So appearance editor. Here we go. Click on templates. Click on index because this is what is set to display. I've got my header and my footer. All right. We're going to open up our list to you now. Actually, you know what? I think we need to see a little something. And here's why. We don't have any content on our blog right now, which makes it really, really challenging to really picture what this is going to look like here. So we're going to head out to our dashboard. You'll notice that my logo has replaced that W up there. So that's the thing I want you about. Let's click on dashboard. Go to plugins. Add new. We are going to install a plugin today called FakerPress, which is going to create a bunch of sample content and pull in some random pictures so that you have a really good idea of what this will actually look like on your website. So you actually have the choice. So add plugins. We're going to look for FakerPress. FakerPress is a clean way to generate fake and dummy content. The great thing about this is that you can also remove this content with the click of a button, which is why this is so powerful. So I used to spend hours just like uploading images and adding random content and just like importing things from other websites that I then had to delete later. That was kind of a pain. So we're going to save ourselves some steps and work smarter, not harder here. So I've installed FakerPress. I've activated FakerPress. And now I've got my FakerPress button. Huzzah. If you're new to plugins, that's how they work. So we're going to do some FakerPress posts. So hover over this. Click on posts. You're going to be taken to a screen that says generate posts. Let's generate, oh, let's say 15 or so. And we do need to change a date range. I'm going to say the last 15 days to today. This has changed a little bit. This used to be a little strange, but it looks like they've made some updates. So this is just going to generate some posts for us, which is going to allow us to style our picture frame and decide, hey, how do I want my post to show up on my index page? We're going to scroll down. There's all kinds of things that you can modify. The one thing that I want you to remove is under this image providers here. I'm going to get rid of place hold it and just leave laurenpixum. Because I think if I remember incorrectly, place hold it just has empty picture things. There's no images, whereas laurenpixum will pull some images for you. So once you have done that, you've set the quantity to 15. You set the date to generate things from the last 15 days. And you got rid of the hold it one and you just have laurenpixum. Go ahead down here and click generate. It's going to generate some fake content for us. Then we wait without any jeopardy music. I always get impatient with this type of wait time. And yes, this will be recorded and whichever one of these because I'm doing two of these today goes more smoothly is going to be the one that appears on learn.wordpress to avoid redundancy. Okay, so it's generating. It might actually be done. This happens to me sometimes with these local sites. But I'm going to now click on my posts up here. And now I have a bunch of fake posts. So none of these are real. If I just open one of these, you're going to see that it has pictures. It has comments. It might have comments. It has all kinds of stuff in here. So it's just fake stuff. And Debbie, you asked if it's going to be recorded. I generally try to get them up within 24 hours. So yeah, it should be up tomorrow. Okay, where was I? I'm going back. All right, so we have all of these fake posts now. So now if I had to appearance an editor, which you should do as well, had to appearance editor, I can actually see some things that appear there. But I'm not seeing the images I expected to see. Maybe it was the other way around. Let's find out. Okay, so I've got a query loop. And so I'm opening up all of these things so I can kind of see what all is happening here. So I'm going to do something a little scary. I'm going to remove this whole group because I don't really want the book recommendations. I don't really want these columns. I'm just going to remove this whole thing. Boom, gone. Nothing but a header and a footer. Now, please, please, please make sure that you are using your list view. Because if you start editing here, if you start clicking around, you're probably going to start editing your header and footer parts. So to avoid this, we're going to open our list view, click these three dots, click insert after. And now I have a safe space to work. So I'm going to press this plus sign here. And I am going to, is this, yes. Okay. So you can, do I want to use patterns? Do I want to use block? It doesn't have as many patterns as I expected. So I'm actually going to click over here to blocks. Bear with me really quick. Okay. That's what we're going to do. So we removed it. We have our list view open. We click insert after. We're going to press this inserter button now. And we're going to click on blocks. And we're going to scroll down to some of our theme blocks. So what theme blocks do is they allow you to pull your content and display it. And we're going to use something known as a query loop, which is the thing that displays all of your posts. Don't actually see it in that list. So I'm going to just type it in. And I'm going to click query loop. And I'm going to click choose. Now you can also start blank if you're very brave and want to experiment. But this allows you to choose several patterns. So it's going to bring you to a screen that looks like this. So you've got your standard WordPress one here. You also, if you click to the right here, you'll see a lot of these different ones as they look. So what we're seeing here, it looks like this one has a featured image to the left. I've got the post title here. This looks like an excerpt. And then there would be like a read more text. I know this because I've done this a lot. Whereas you've got one here, that's just an image and just the title of the post. You can select a lot of different options. Looks like this one is just dates. Interesting. So these tend to be a lot of different ones. You can also click this button here. And it will show you a grid view of it so that you can kind of compare and contrast here. Yeah, I don't know. Do you all have a preference on which one you want to use? I'm just curious. Let's see. Just use the standard one. Now you're welcome to pick whichever one you would like. But because we've made that fake content here, you can see a little bit more of what you're looking at here. So now every new blog post I write is going to appear here. Can we use a three column one and add a picture later? Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm going to remove that. Let's use that one. So once again, I'm going to make sure I am not putting this into my header template part. I'm going to do insert after. And then I'm going to press my inserter up here. Very loops. So you can also start blank, which I actually did not mean to do. So what I get for not getting enough sleep, y'all, you're going to see me do this a couple times. All right, insert after, press the button, blocks, query, choose. I really like three column ones as well, honestly. So that's what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this three column one. Now you wanted to say, hey, could we add a picture here? And we can definitely do that. So let's say that I'm looking at this. I really like the simplicity of this, but I really want my featured images to show up. I'm going to use my list view here. Open up my query loop. Let's say that I want an image right above my post title. So this is already nicely grouped together for me. I'm going to select these three dots here. Click insert before. Now I'm going to go and use a theme block. So rather than patterns, I'm selecting blocks. Now it can be really tempting. Oh, look, there's an image I want to put this here. Unless you want this image to appear, this exact image to appear above this every single time, like if you want each post featured image to appear, you're going to have to use a theme block rather than a media block. So we're going to scroll down to theme. What you know about theme blocks is that these are the things that pull from your content. And I'm going to click post featured image. And now if I look at this, I have a post featured image there. I feel like it should have added there as well. I'm not, I'm surprised that it, oh yeah, okay. So something kind of funky seems to be going on with the editor for some reason today, but there are post featured images above each one. So I'm actually going to go, I'm going to say that I thought that this would generate featured images. I guess I, so yeah, one thing that's happening right now as I'm clicking around, I think we might have found a bug today. This is something else that has been happening as I've been trying to design a block theme. So that explains quite a bit. It's not just me. Hooray. I'm so excited. I'm going to go head back to my dashboard. And I'm going to go to my most recent posts, my simple, just the most recent ones. It doesn't, interesting. That should be showing. Wonder if that's a fake or pressed thing or a word pressed thing. I'm just going to go, and I'm going to add these featured images here. And I'm going to see if I can't get them to show up appropriately. I'm just going to select some random ones. I'm going to click update. Okay. Now I'm going to head back to my appearance editor. I'm going to see what it did because it should be showing those images. There they go. Okay. It was just an issue with fake or press. Okay. So you can see that because I went and I made sure that my featured images were set correctly. I think that was a fake or press issue. You can now picture this a lot easier. So yeah, I think that that was the issue. So the question was asked, hey, can we change the number of columns after we've done that? Yes. So remember there are three places that we can play with this. Somewhere. I have, oh, I've selected post. That's what I get for clicking. That's why you got to use your list view. Here we go. We can transform things. We can turn this into a list view. Oh, look, suddenly it's a completely different one. And then over here, you can see, hey, we have multiple columns here. So now I just changed it to four, five, six, like you can do that. You can see it's not as pretty. I'm going to change the size of my screen really quick and close this list view. So one thing that you definitely want to test is making sure that like on mobile or tablets, it's not going to do something funny like this. So this is probably what this would look like on a tablet. But it's set to do this on a mobile phone. So that's just something to be aware of as you do this. It does obviously shift automatically with different sizes. So I'm going to use my list view, make sure that my query loop is set. I'm going to make sure I'm not on my global styles. And I'm going to change my columns to whatever size you would like. Now, you might be tempted right now to start changing your text, your backgrounds, things like this. If you do that, you're welcome to. But as I found out the hard way, when I wanted to make changes globally on my website, so that every heading of like, you know, every text, like every instance of text changed, this overrides that. So we'll get into that in just a minute. But right now I'm going to save because we've got a header. We have a query loop and we have a footer. And so the 2023 theme is responsive to viewing in tablets. I just had so many columns that it was not displaying particularly well. There are things that I could probably do to get around that. But like, as you can see here, making it smaller this way, it just displayed better. So Catherine said it really well. It is responsive to all screen sizes but the break points are present in the block editor. So the column block does become a single column only on small screens. So it's just something to be aware of. And it's something that is always being worked on as WordPress evolves. So it's getting better and better. So Jean asked a great question. How do I get it to set a certain number of posts such as three? Right now it's defaulting to six. Mine is doing the same thing. So that's probably in a setting here in the query loop somewhere. So I'm going to select it here. And I wasn't that one. Nope. It's somewhere. It's not that button. There is a way to do that here. Or at least I believe there is a way to do that here. So one thing that you'll notice is that I am clicking around quite a bit. Nope. That wasn't it. I know that there's a way to do this. But you'll notice that different settings are being turned on. So I can do an overlay opacity on my featured image. I can say, hey, I want every single featured image to have this duo tone over top of it. So as you click through, you will find lots of different options that you can play with. But back to Jean's question. I swear there's a way to do it. I think it's in one of these controls somewhere. I just don't remember where it is. And that's one of the things that happens sometimes is that you do sometimes get lost here. So your other option should be in the reading settings, I think. It used to be up near, yeah, I thought it was two. I wonder what happened with that? Because we've got our columns. It's not under advanced. Oh, although let's go back to that question that I think. Oh, I found it. I found it. It is in a very tricky place. So you first have to toggle off on the right hand side where it says inherit query from template. You toggle that off. And then there is on the block toolbar on top of that. Ah, there we go. Well, no wonder we couldn't find it. I wonder why they did that. I don't know, but I recalled that it had been moved to a rather unintuitive spot, to be honest. Yeah. Okay. Well, that will be some feedback that we pass along. Okay, cool. That makes me feel better that I didn't just completely miss it. Thank you, Catherine. Okay, but M was talking about something really important, and that was differentiating between headers and footers and query loops. So one thing that you definitely want to have for this blog, select the query loop here and scroll down in your settings. So if you're completely on a white screen here to get there, we're going to use our list view here. We're going to select query loop. We're going to open our settings. We will scroll down to where it says advanced. This HTML element here, move to main. And what this does, what this does is it makes it so that someone who is using a screen reader can skip whatever is up top here and get right to the main content, which is actually another reason probably to group the main content so that people can get to what is most important faster. Because if you're navigating a website and you're using a screen reader, you don't want to necessarily read every single link that's going to exist in this menu once we've created it. You just want to get to the point, and that allows people to do so and is really, really good for search engines as well. So just keep that in mind. All right, so now we've got our structure. We've got our structure. So what did I say we were going to do next? All right, I'm going to scroll through this. Okay, so that's what we were doing just now. We were basically cutting out the holes for our content to appear. So you can see this is one blog post. It has my excerpt. It has my featured image. It has my title. We've done that. It is 1213. My talk is very insistent that she would like to go outside, but we still have 45 minutes so she can wait. Let's make sure that we finish our structure. Because again, at this point, you should have a heading. You should be it. You should have all of this extra stuff here. I feel like we need our about pages and our contact pages. So let's actually start making some content, y'all. Click on your icon in the top left hand corner. Let's head to our dashboard. And for the first time, let's go to pages, add new. So we're going to create our about page really quick. So I'm going to type in about up here. You'll know that you're in the page editor and not in your big old template site editor because the global styles have gone. Whenever you're in a page editor, you can't make changes globally on an entire website. So that will be really, really nice. So let's start by typing in our about page, just about. And I'm actually going to. So you have a couple of options here. We can use our inserter here. We can use patterns here. But there's not one specifically for about me. But WordPress has, that's not what I wanted to do. WordPress has a pattern library that anyone can submit to. And you can search for about patterns. And this is pretty new. Goodness. Now I can't type in the chat box at all. Why is it doing that? My Zoom is having problems, y'all. That is not what I wanted to do either. All right. Apparently I'm just not going to work with it. But so what you can do here is you can look for an about pattern. I also feel like, okay, so you can click that about button or you can also just type in about up here. I figured they would show the same things, but they did not. And you can pick a pattern that speaks to you here. I've definitely used this one in the past. Looks like there are seven pages of about patterns. Not just, haha, there are 115. That's interesting. So if you wanted to search for that, the choice is yours. You can select whichever one you want. All you have to do, hover your mouse over it, press copy, and then I just press control V or paste. I wonder if I can, yep, right clicked paste. And suddenly I have that pattern right there. It's as simple as that. So that way I'm not having to build everything from scratch here. And if I don't like it, I can either undo or just delete it all. And I can just search for all kinds of stuff. So I'm going to copy this one. I like it. Paces in here. I'm fancy Tracy. And you should be able to type. Now there might be things that appear with these. I have to reinstall zoom after this. There might be some things here that aren't useful for you, right? Like for example, this one came with a button that says schedule. I don't need that for my website. So I can just go and select whichever is the pair one and just remove them. Like I don't need that. I can definitely write in here. And when I'm ready, I can click publish. And we're just going to do the same thing again. Again, you can use whichever block patterns you want. Just know that if you pick a different one, like you may have to remove or modify and change things. But I can definitely replace this image with one of my own. Yeah. So there's that. Let's make one more page. So to get back there, that is now live. I've published it. Ooh, it looks like I can just click add new page from right there. Let's do that. And I am just going to write contact here. And I'm going to do the same thing again. I'm going to search for contact and just see what I've got. I have several different options. Look at all this. That's lovely. I'm going to copy this one. This is kind of pretty. You can pick whichever one you want. I'm just going to paste that in there. Ooh, that doesn't look very good. I don't know about that. The other option I have, what does that do? Page. Nope, that didn't do a thing. Okay. That was new to me. Remove that. So some of them will work better than others. Let's copy that one. And you can either choose to modify them or leave them. Now, one thing that I would recommend rather than putting your email here, I would use some sort of contact form. Bots really, really like to collect email addresses and contact forms are one way to help prevent that. So you can use plugins such as contact form seven. I really like Jetpack because it also comes with some additional security features. Yeah, but you can definitely add those two things at a later date. But wow, this is all the way at the bottom. I'm going to try and just going to modify this. Ah, there we go. Align top. That's one of the places. Beautiful. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use this here and I'm going to make this contact us button read. We're going to come back and talk about that in a minute because next we're going to make our website pretty. So I'm going to publish both of these pages. Don't just save them. We need them live. I'm going to now head back to appearance and editor. Please join me over here. So once again, head to appearance and editor in the chat that I need to see. It is not loading at all for some reason. So I'm going to need you to speak up for this one. Thank you. All right. Let's start by adding our navigation menu and then we're going to make things a little prettier. So you can either make that change here. But once again, best practice is to say, hey, I'm going to edit my template parts only in the template parts section. So I am going to create a new menu. I'm going to press this plus sign here and you can see, oh, look, I have a link here as well. So I'm just going to add both of those about the contact pages so that people can find me in the future. So the way that I did that once again is I selected create a new menu. Now, if you don't have this at all, if this just isn't on your website and you're just looking at site logo and site title, I'm going to click on these three dots, insert after. What we need here is our navigation. So we're looking for this button here, this block. And then I can press, I'm going to switch back to my list to make sure I'm working on the right thing. Yep, I've got navigation. I press this add block and I can select the pages that I just made. And because I'm looking at the wrong thing, there we go. So add block, contact, lots of different options here. I'm going to go ahead and center this and save it. Do we have any questions on how to set that up for right now? Are we good? I don't see any new numbers in the chat box, so. Nothing in the chat confirming. Excellent. Yeah, my Zoom is just having problems today. Being naughty today. It'll be okay. All right. So now let's head back to our templates. Let's head back to our index. So again, I clicked on site icon. I clicked templates. I clicked index. And now we are going to make this a little bit prettier. So we're going to do that all at once. So I think there's a concept that I read one, so I don't have the exact words, but it is basically design it once the changes will appear everywhere. I don't know exactly what that one is, is called, but we're going to do that in our global styles. So 2023 theme is unique in that it comes with some additional styles that were all designed by, well, designers, people who were inspired by something. So you're going to start by clicking on this half moon icon up here. That's your styles. And then you're going to click browse styles. Now, you can change just about anything, but it can be a really pretty quick way to design your entire website by picking the one that speaks the most to you. So I really like this sherbet one. That's really, oh, no, no, I do not. Wow. That's fascinating. You can definitely click on a couple to decide what speaks the most to you. And you can see the fonts are changing. The background is changing. The sizes are changing. Each of these has a different thing. That's part of why we have this fake content here is so that you can actually see what these changes do to your website on a big scale. So I'm going to pick this aubergine, which is apparently eggplant in French. I learned that the other day. I'm learning French. And you can see that this has applied to every single block on my entire website. And I'm going to save it. So let's say that I don't really like this pink. I like everything else about it, but I want to make sure that all of my headings and my links be a different color. I can do that, I believe under this colors buttons here. I have a color palette here with 17 different colors. I can't remember if this has been updated with 6.1 or not. I'm actually going to edit this color. It may change. It may not. We're going to find out. It worked. Oh, it didn't work yesterday when I did this. Okay, cool. So by changing this color here, any place that used that color changed. You can see it here. You can see it in my headings. You can see it in my links. Let's make that a little bit more readable. There we go. And it makes that change everywhere. So it looks like the theme designer did that on headings. Looks like this on that underline. Maybe some links. I'm going to save that now. And I'm going to show you something because it's going to throw you off otherwise, but you can definitely use that there. So that'll make changes across the entire website. You also have options for typography. You can change your font. Looks like 2023 has several different ones you can pick from. You can also use a plugin to get more. You can change the sizes of things. You can really customize quite a bit. And you can even do it pixel perfect if you want. So the difference between 303 is quite a bit, but I'm going to reset that. The other thing about styles that is really important for you as designers is that you may get to a point where it's really ugly and you don't like it anymore. I do that sometimes because I am not a designer. These three buttons here. So you click styles here. I can reset everything to the defaults with a click of a button. Bigger question. What happens if I press undo? Okay. The undo button works for that too. Cool. Today I learned. So I'm going to save this here. And you can go through. There's so much you can do here. This layout section allows you to add padding. So let's say that I want this to not be quite so expansive. I can add 30 pixels of padding to the right, 30 pixels of padding to the bottom, to the left. And you can see kind of that this is going to change the entire look and feel of my site. So there's a lot of options here. Now you don't have to necessarily do all of that. You can also go block by block. So this is going to style everything across your site top to bottom. You can also say, hey, maybe with this, maybe with every heading, I don't want it to be quite, I don't want it to be that font. You can just say, hey, just for headings, I want to change that. It won't change it anywhere else. So if anywhere else, that's a bad example. Let me try a different one. These headings are basically everywhere. Let's say that I always want my quotes rather than being this white text. Let's say I want my quote to be a gray color. I can save this. And if I add a quote, which I probably wouldn't add here anyway, but let me add a quote here, rather than being white text, you can see that it is the cyan color. And you can see that changing here. Without it, if I hadn't set that color, it would just have pulled from what I set as my text color. So I don't want to reset that. I'm just going to press this clear button. You'll see that now it's there. So you can go block by block and say, hey, anytime I use a quote, anytime I make a button, you can stylize it to your liking. But again, this is above and beyond, you don't have to necessarily do that. Now, one thing that you're going to find, oh man, one thing that you're going to find as you do this is that if you have made any changes in the settings, be that in the site editor here. So let's say that I want this text color to be teal or white. This is changing across the query block. But if I set this to white here, and then I go back to my global styles and I try and change the text color from white to something else, I go back to my colors. If I try to change it to gray, you'll notice that text isn't changing. And that is because any setting that you select overrides the global styles that you do elsewhere. And I learned this the hard way. I had styled my entire website using settings. So I went block by block and put it in the settings here. And I wasn't actually able to figure out how to, man, oh man, I wasn't able to figure out how to change it back until that happens. And you're going to see that again on a page that I did. So I'm going to head back to my dashboard. And this is really important because it can be really frustrating. Remember how I made that contact red? This should be this color up here. This is a heading, which I know because it has this simple here, the h2 here, this should be that color. But because I decided to color it in here on this individual page, it's overwriting that. So yeah, that's a little tricky. But it's just it's one of those things to know. It's a really good idea to stylize your website here in the editor first using global styles so that anytime you make something new, if you decided that you wanted to change the entire look and feel of your website, you could do it in one place rather than having to go back post by post into the settings. Yeah, any questions about that? I'm not seeing anything else. I can see the chat with a little one next to it. And that's it. So any questions about that? That's a really tricky thing. Cool. Well, that's just fantastic, y'all. So it's 1232. You now have a blog with an about page, a contact page. It's all set up. I promised you a couple of other things. So let me go double check what those were. Mara seems to have disappeared. I don't know what happened, but I think we were nearing the end. Let me just check with her. Perhaps some internet issue there, but I think she was wrapping up. So we'll give it just a minute. And if there are any final questions, let me know. I think Sarah might be back. Hi. There she is. That was fun. All the things today, all the things. Yeah, I'm getting pretty nervous about the second one without you not going to lie. Just to answer Debbie's question for anyone else who wants to save the chat. If you look in the chat box at the bottom right, there should be three little horizontal dots. If you click those three little dots, you should see save chat there. I think that's an option available even if you're not the host like I am. So do you? Okay, perfect. Okay. Well, I can see the chat again, and I think I can write to everybody again. So this seems, this goes well. What was the last thing I said? I think you were saying that you were wrapping up, really. That's the last thing I remember. Yeah, I think the other thing that we were going to maybe discuss was categories and tags, just because that's one other thing that you need to know like that in posting settings. So yeah, let's talk about that really quick. So I'm just curious, what are you blogging about this year, y'all? I was thinking about starting like a writer's blog. The other thing I'm doing is I'm trying to do a blog about my adventures in WordPress. So like what it means to teach WordPress. That's my blog. Science education. Yes, water safety. Excellent. Excellent. What else? We'll see you guys blog about this year. You all blogging about this year. I really like science education. Let's talk about that. Let's say I was writing a blog about science education. I think the first thing that I would want to do, and you don't need to do this until, well, let's not do that. All right, posts. Under this post section, you have what are known as categories and tags. And these are basically ways that people can find what they're looking for. So let's start with categories. Categories separate ideas. So if I was doing a beauty blog, I might have separate categories on hair and on makeup and on, I don't know, skincare. All of these things are separate topics. They allow readers to drill down to the very specific topics that they want. So if I were doing one on science education, you might have different categories such as biology, right? So all you have to do to add new cat. And it's a good idea to think about this ahead of time just because it allows you to organize things onto different pages and allows readers to find this. I also tend to write these as I go, and that gets very confusing just because I end up with more categories than I need. So if I'm writing one on science education, I will have biology. I might have chemistry. I might have, I don't know, what's another thing in the science? Ecology. Science, right? So each one of my posts could be tagged this way. So let me show you what I mean by that. So right now, we don't have any post tag this, but I'm going to go to my posts. And I'm just going to give, there are several different ways that you can do this. This is one way I'm doing this the fast way to add tags to this. Now we have three posts in ecology. So if I head to ecology and look at this page, only posts that I tagged with ecology appear on this. You can just see those three there. And so if that was something that I wanted people to be able to find, I could add that category in a link at the top of my page. It allows people to find what they want rather than having to sift through dozens or hundreds or, I don't know, if you're really prolific thousands of posts to try and find what they want. So it's a really good idea to start by thinking about, hey, what are the different buckets, if you will, that people would want to put that in? So if I head to my dashboard, that setting is under posts categories. And I would highly recommend having categories. And the way that you think about this is that like something that would go into a chemistry category would not be put into the biology category. You only want most of the time one category per post. Would it be possible to assign different categories to different blocks on the homepage? Yes, that is so great. Let me, while you guys are thinking about this, let me show you how cool this could be. So I'm going to go to appearance and editor. So let's say that I just wanted my ecology posts here. I use my handy-dandy side editor. I select my query loop. And then I select this filters button. So taxonomies, this is just a way of sorting things, right? And that's what we're doing with our categories. A category is a type of taxonomy. So now if I type in ecology, suddenly just the ecology posts appear. And yeah, that is so awesome. This used to be so hard. I helped so many people do this in classic themes. And it never was this pretty. So I'm pretty excited about it. So yeah, so let's do that. So I highly recommend thinking about that. Meanwhile, let's talk about tags. Now, you don't necessarily need to pre-think out your tags as much. I think it's more of an organic thing. I mean, they're basically hashtags. They're basically things that they have in common, right? So if I go to my posts, we don't have any tags yet, I'm going to look at my categories, right? And now I'm starting to think, okay, what do these things happen common? So in biology and chemistry, let's say I was talking about blood, right? If I were talking about blood, there might be certain things, what the chemistry is of, I don't know, what the chemical makeup of blood is, right? But it's also something that's in biology. So they're the small things that link between posts. And it can be a good idea to think about what that might be. So for example, let's say that I'm writing a travel blog. My categories that separate might be things like continents, right? North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, all of the different countries, those might be different categories. But things that are similar between them are things like rivers, beaches, mountains. It's another way that people can follow breadcrumbs to find more of what they want. So if I am traveling to Africa, like I don't want to see anything about South America, for example, right? If I'm that reader, I want to separate that with my categories. Or if I just want to find the world's best beaches, I want to find all of the beaches all around the world. So it just depends on what your reader wants. So pre-planning this out is a really good thing to do. That was that. Super simple just to get you set up for success. And then I have one more thing. What was it? I think we were just going to go over post settings. Yeah. So let's say that I'm ready to write any post. So I'm going to write add new. You'll notice that the styles that I picked earlier have now been applied to my theme, my first blunt post. So the same way that we had multiple toggles up here, we also have multiple between the settings and the styles. We also have multiple things here. So you're going to use your insert at the same way. But this is where I write my beautiful and brilliant content. Hooray. And you can just, you can build your blog the same way there that we have lots of resources over on learn about like how to do this, using patterns, things like that. But these post settings here can be a little hard to find. So if you first start and you're just looking at a blank screen, you're going to use the settings button to toggle it on. And you can go post by post, you can stylize it again, turn out to do that too much because it makes it really hard to change. But these post ones are really important. So you've got several settings in here that are really useful. So you can publish a post immediately. You can also schedule a post to be published in the future. That's a nifty thing that I thought was really interesting. And you just select the date and schedule. And then your next blog post will go live at the time and date that you set, right? So there's that. You can also make changes. And then you just click that schedule button again. You can also backdate posts. So I can say, Hey, I want this to have been published yesterday. And now it is live on my site. Here are those categories and tags here that we were talking about as you write new posts. Having a list here is really useful. Uncategorized is the default one, which you can also change in that categories. But this is how I can say, Hey, I've decided that this is an ecology post. I want this to appear on the front page. I can add that there. Meanwhile, we can add tags here. Let's see. What tags was I thinking about? Blood. That's not ecology. That doesn't make sense. Trees. Grass. I don't know. Those maps are all wavy. Frogs, yeah. I don't know why when you said ecology, I thought frogs. Well, because, yeah, they're kind of one of those like predictor species, right? Anyway, so that's where you would go to add that there. So the featured image is one of the things that gets pulled. So you set that there. Important note, if you're sharing your blog on social media, if you're sharing a specific post, this is the image that will get shared. So if you have a ton of images, let's just put a gallery here. If you just had one image on your page, it would select that. But like, let's say you have a bunch. If you want this one to be the main one, that is where you set that. This is also a short little blurb. This is also shown on social media. And it's also something that you can show on your front page. There was a good question from Debbie, which I kind of answered, but I'd like to hear your input. Debbie asks, is there a certain number of tags you should use? What are your thoughts? I usually stick to around 10 to 15, too, actually. And the reason for that is because, guys, stop. My dog's here. There's another dog outside. Anyway, the reason for that is because you want your readers to be able to find what they're looking for. If you have more than 10 or 15 tags that someone's skimming, they're going to lose interest. They're not going to be able to find other posts that have a similar topic to that. So if they can't find what they're looking for, they're going to bounce. Yeah. So I would definitely say 10 to 15 tops. If anybody else has a thought on that, too, I'd be curious about that. The last setting that you should know about here is this discussion setting. This is the how you can allow comments on individual posts and pages. So if I just add something there, update. Okay. If I view this post at the bottom, I have this beautiful comment box. I'm going to leave a comment. You can see my comments appeared there. Highly recommend a plugin called Akismet. I think that comes with Jetpack, but lots of bots will leave comments and it's a whole thing. So that's just something to know. But let's say you don't want something. Let's say you wrote something and you just, you don't want this on your website. You can turn that off by going backwards. Not that far back. You can turn that off by saying, hey, I don't want anybody to be able to write comments on this thing. So if I view this post now, the comment that was already there is there. I may have to go back and delete it manually, but nobody else can write comments. So let's say you write something and people just explode over something and you just don't want them to continue a conversation. You do have that power to turn that off. But yeah, managing. Wordpress.org. This is one of the very first tutorials. Apparently, it's a random quiz. Interesting. Okay, we're going to, that's not good. We need to figure that out. We're learning all kinds of bugs here. Managing, comments. If you're really curious about managing comments, managing spam, we have a couple of really great tutorials here. So that's and then this for future reading. And then can you set it to not post the comments until approved? Yes. So Catherine, answer that question. Yes, you can set comments to be moderated, especially with that one plugin. And then someone, you can also set it so that somebody who is like fairly active on your site who's commented once before can also just comment without anything as well. So you can say, hey, all comments need to be approved by me or, hey, you're actually a person. You're not a bot. You commented before. You read my blog regularly. It does allow you to do that, to have them actually post immediately. So it's kind of a smarter thing. So yeah. So, and you've got a lot of settings here that Catherine is mentioning. So if I go to my dashboard, the settings discussion, there's a lot that you can control here. So allow people to submit comments on new posts. If I deselect that here, the option and a new post will not be automatically checked on. So let's say I don't want anybody to comment on my posts. I can save that change. Now if I go to posts, add new. Here's another post. If I go down to that settings, and I'm switching over to my post here, you'll notice that that allow comments has been checked off. So WordPress is really, really great at making sure that you can select something one time and make sure that your preferences are remembered. Which can make it very complicated, but it also can save you a lot of time once you're all set up. Now it is 12.50 today. In spite of all the technical difficulties and take-ups, you all have been wonderful. I feel like we should delete some of the images and extra blog posts that you no longer want because you're ready to start blogging now. Faker, press. Just click on Faker, press. And then there's just a race faked data. You literally just type, let it go. And now I'm going to click this delete button. It says that all data is gone for good. And now you'll see it's just what I created. Now, one thing that you should know is that if you used images from Faker, press, like those are all broken now. It also deleted those images. So keep that in mind. There's time for this, but I'm just going to throw out a question and you can decide if there's time or not. But James is asking if there are drawbacks of, and I believe you were referring to pingbacks and trackbacks. I sent a link to the .org support article about it, but I don't know if you have any quick thoughts about that benefits or drawbacks of allowing pingbacks and trackbacks. I really think that it is probably more of a benefit because it allows you without a plugin to track if your website is being linked to you on other websites and what those websites are. And that can be really good for search engine optimization, right? Because if your blog is mentioned on other reputable blogs, that boosts your rating and makes you appear higher to be linked that way to be referenced by another reputable website. Conversely, if it's a website that isn't considered reputable, maybe they just make up stories or something and search engines say, hey, this isn't factually based, that could be a detriment. How do I make, oh, go ahead. I wasn't sure if you could see the chat. Again, it's working now. I'm so excited. How do I make blog images all the same size? I feel there's a way to do that with image optimization. It kind of depends on what you mean. If you mean the dimensions, like you all want them all to be square every single time you put an image block inside a blog post, I don't know if there's a built-in way to limit that. I think you would have to select the size or the shape for each image within the blog. I know there's a way you can make them all smaller. I have a really bad habit of uploading things directly from my phone, which the image sizes are like 4,000 pixels across, it's like a picture of my dinner. It doesn't need to be that big. There's a way that you can optimize it that way. There might be something in settings. Let's take a peek. It does depend what you mean exactly by size, Debbie, because there's weight, file weight. Do you want to automatically shrink the weight of the file so they load faster, or are you talking about the dimensions, the shape, like you want them all to be squares? Or do you want them all to be a specific size, like this many pixels by this many pixels? There's some nuance there. Go square. You want them all square. I don't know if there's a way to control that. There might be a plugin to do that actually. So it doesn't sound like a core feature of WordPress. If anybody knows of a plugin that would do that, by all means drop it into the chat. But otherwise, I know that you can select with theme blocks certain sizes. So if I go to appearance editor, if I want all of my featured images, let me make sure I'm selecting it, I can set the dimensions here so I can make them 50 by 50, or I can make them 500 by 500. I can make them all the same size that way, but that's only true of theme blocks. If I were to just upload a random picture and use it in a blog post, that wouldn't be the case. There's all these different options here. I can say, hey, I want every single image to have a border. I can do that in global style. So if I go to blocks, let's see if this has turned on for that layout. I can say that I want every image to have a border and maybe have a curve around it. But otherwise, I don't think you can select a certain size. And just to add, within single blog posts, you can do this same thing. So the key would be that you'd need to use featured images and not random image blocks. So you can edit your single post template, put the featured image in there, and set it to be square the number of pixels you want, but not within individual posts. John is also asking, we have a few minutes left, I don't know if there's time, but do you have an opinion on converting JPEG and PNG images to web key format, which is a newer image format that I don't know. I don't know anything about that at this moment. Unfortunately, I can definitely learn about it, but I think some browsers don't support that format yet. So if you do set up something to convert your images to that format, just be mindful to have a fallback. Make sure whatever you use has a fallback so that older browsers that haven't quite caught up and don't yet support that will still be able to display your images. So it's not yet something that's default in core, as far as I know, because it's, the browsers still have to catch up. Okay, so Debbie, I think I figured out how you can make every image the same size. So if you add an image to a post, it won't do it automatically, you're going to have to go image by image, I believe, but I'm able to select the width and the height. Now this image is perfectly square. So if I make it slightly different, you'll notice that it definitely gets skewed there a little bit. So that that's a little bit of a drawback there. But yeah, I feel like there is a way at some point to make it so that it selects where your image should be. But that would be the best thing that WordPress has got at the moment in core. Well, it is 1256, y'all. At this point, you should have a blog all set up and ready to go. Now you're welcome to experiment with it. If you are brand new and are starting to wonder like how to do certain things, like learn.wordpress.org has all kinds of short little video tutorials that can help you to do things like let's say you wanted to display your comments differently. Looks like we've got a tutorial on that. Padding versus margin. If you see that and you're like, what is that even? You might be able to find some good information there. So I hope you all are ready to get blogging and that this was valuable for you. Cheers, everybody. Have a great one.