 As if I'm not short enough already I'm sitting in a chair that makes me even shorter so long as you can hear me I guess that's all that really matters thank you for being here this morning I am here this morning to talk about the hidden features of WordPress can you all hear me okay if I don't hold the microphone if it's in front of me excellent very good just want to make sure thanks so the hidden features of WordPress the good news is they're not really hiding they're there for you it's just that most of us don't know about them until we start to explore through WordPress and discover some of the things that are there for us some of the things we're going to look at today are screen options the help screens the help menus that we have in there post options page options the editor that you have in post and page quick editing a plugin favorites favoriting plugins is one of the things that saves me from having to look up every plugin that I can't remember the actual name of every time I try to add something to a site and then some miscellaneous shortcuts as well and then we'll save some time at the end for Q&A but if you do have any truly pressing questions feel free to interrupt while we're on those screens so screen options are something that appear on many of the admin pages in your dashboard so you'll see screen options on things like the dashboard your pages and posts comments widgets menus plugins and even on your users pages that you look at and the dashboard you'll see that you have screen options they include the standard options that come with WordPress but depending on which themes you have installed and what plugins you have installed you'll see additional options and screen options that pertain specifically to your theme and to your plugins when you're logged into your dashboard and if you have your laptop with you and you want to take a look as we go along feel free you can kind of look at your dashboard as we can you can see where these things are I will post at the very end a link to this presentation as well so you'll be able to find this again later but the screen options are in the upper right hand corner right next to where it says howdy Michelle or whatever your name is and so you'll see those up there and you'll be able to pull those down and take a look and what the different options are for that particular for that particular dashboard so the very first thing you see when you log into your WordPress site is the dashboard right and we see the main dashboard many of us kind of skim over it go to what we're looking for but there's a lot of really important things that are right on there and a lot of those are really dependent on what kinds of plugins you have in there so if you are running an SEO plugin you're probably going to see a little card on there that's showing you what's going on with your SEO if you're running a backup plugin you're probably going to see a card on there that shows you what's going on with your backups how frequently you backed up how recently you backed up and how many changes have been made since you backed up last so you could get an idea of whether or not you should be hitting that backup button in between what you've already got scheduled so your main options your screen options on your dashboard are going to let you toggle on and off which one of those cards will show up on that page and that's what the that's what the screen options do is they toggle on and off things in your dashboard for example when you look at your post list and you can see I've got it pulled down here the screen options you can look at the author you can look at the categories and tags you can turn on and off the number of comments that appear different data points things like that and you can see on this one I've got an SEO plugin plugged in and so it's also asking me if I want to see the SEO title the meta description the focus keyword etc so you can add or eliminate as much information about each post that you want to see the thing I like the best though is I can change the number of posts that appear on any page that I'm looking at in the dashboard so for example if I've got a site and I've got 200 posts and it's showing me 20 posts per page if I want to see a post that's on that fourth page but I don't remember what it's called I have to click keep clicking the over arrow until I get the next 20 the next 20 the next 20 instead I can change the number of posts or pages that appear in that list to be as many as 999 so that I can just have a continuous scroll to look at all of the different posts that I have there you know you can change the order by chronology you can change the order by the name by the author but this way I can just kind of I can order them the way I want and then just continue a scroll all the way to the bottom to look for the one that I'm looking for or use the control or command F key to find something really quickly in there as well on the page I love that feature I change every single page and post even if I have five pages on a website I change that to 999 because I could add more and I don't want to have to click over over over all the time so that's my my one big cheat for when I am using looking at the screen options again again as I said it's going to change whether or not it's the options are going to change depending on what plug-ins you have in there the other thing is you can get a list view or an excerpt view so if I change from if I just have the list view I'm going to see the title and I'm going to see all the information straight across if I have the excerpt view it's going to pull either an excerpt that I've indicated on that page on that post or it's going to pull the first part of that post and show me exactly what that post says or the excerpt that I've indicated that just makes it a lot longer to scroll but also it helps you if you're looking for specific content as your eyes scroll down the page I have a habit of just using screen or using keyboard shortcuts and so if I have all 999 down there I can take a look not that I've ever actually had a thousand posts but it's it's coming that day is coming so it gives you that opportunity when you're actually in a post so you're editing a post you've got the editor window open you also have screen options there so you can toggle on or off the different areas of what you see when you're editing a post you can turn on and off the the SEO area I don't suggest turning that off I think you should optimize every post but you can turn those things on and off and a lot of that is going to depend on exactly what you have as far as your different plugins that you're using as well so you see here I've got different plugins turned on there are free plugins social warfare Yoast I've got those turned on so that I can see you exactly what's going on I have the ability to interact with those different cards on that on that page what else it will do is it'll actually let you go a layout from one column to two columns so what we see is a default when we are editing a poster page as we see two columns so you see the column to the left is where you're editing and then you've got your publish and of your other columns your featured image etc down the right hand side if you want more space to be able to edit but you don't want to go to the distraction free editing you can go to one column which will push all those right hand cards down to the bottom underneath your editing window so you would have to scroll down to hit publish for example but it does give you the opportunity to have a little more space to be able to do some editing in so you have the ability to do that and then you have the distraction free and we're going to see that in a couple more slides but distraction free will open everything up and just make it possible to focus on writing without a lot of extra information on the screen your screen options for your page lists works very much the same as for posts with the exception that we don't have tags and categories on pages so those those fields are not going to show up for you to be able to take them out everything else however is still there so you've got your SEO you've got your meta descriptions anything that goes with your plugins that way and then I think you can also I know you can also go from 20 page 20 poster pages per list to more so you go ahead and change that if you have more than 20 pages it makes it a lot easier to scroll down through those when you are editing a page of course it's a little bit different because as I said we don't have categories and tags some of the other things we have perhaps is the ability to do parent and hierarchy as far as the pages are concerned so those things the page attributes things like that will show up on the right hand side and you can toggle those on and off again through your screen options at the top and then you can also go from the one column to two columns to one column back and forth and then also that distraction free writing that we talked about so looking at your screen options and any one of those areas in your dashboard will just give you an additional ability to change the way that you're using WordPress show you things that you might not know we're there or take away the things that you don't really care about to make your editing experience better this is just a way that you can customize your dashboard for yourself comments we also have screen options and comments so you can toggle on and off the days the the date that it was submitted in response to which article or post and then also the author on or off so if you're the only author on your blog and you're the only author ever on your dashboard maybe that's not an important column to you you'd have like to have a little more space to see what those comments are if you have a blog where you have many contributors then that's a important column because then you can see who it is that might need to respond to those different comments and again you can change the number of items on the page now widgets does have a screen option but all it does is change from the way that you're that you're used to seeing the default way that you see widgets to accessibility widgets so if you are somebody or you know somebody who's visually impaired navigating through the default way to look at widgets is not as easy because it's all pull-downs every one of those as a drop-down menu if you change to accessibility now you have links that allow you to add and on the subsequent page then you can determine what page things go on it just makes it a much easier experience for someone with who's blind or visually impaired so that's the only thing that's in the screen options under widgets I made the mistake once of turning it on and that I couldn't understand why that that one site was acting so differently than the rest and then I remembered my screen options and the ability to change that back and forth but the one thing that the thing that made me learn the most the very first time I was ever aware of screen options was because I had two websites that needed to link back and forth to each other one was a church and one was this the school associated with the church and they wanted in the main navigation a link back and forth to each other's sites but they wanted them to open in different tabs so that if you were on the church site you could open the school site but you didn't lose the fact that you were on the church site and I had no idea how to make that happen because the menus that are built into WordPress don't have a place automatically by default to check open in a new tab so of course I googled it because that's what we do and we can't figure something out and it was like oh just pull down the screen options and there's a link target you can do so if you actually pull that screen options down click that link target it will open up an ability in when you're editing line by line of the menu to say open this in a new tab or window and that's how I discovered how to do that and that's how I discovered the world of screen options and how I could completely customize the way that I interacted with WordPress through my own dashboard but again you can toggle on and off different things that are over on the left-hand side you can take in or out the posts and pages a lot of those menu structure type things it's not really distracting to have them there but the ability to add that to link target the title attribute etc CSS classes those are things that can help you change your menus in a way that you wouldn't know of otherwise with or that you would try to do with code but that are just already embedded right into WordPress the screen options for your plugins only has turning on and off the description and the number of items per page so I have actually edited inherited websites that had 50 60 or 70 plugins on the site and I thought that was a little overwhelming we did trim back quite a few of those but in order to see all of them at once and be able to compare what was going on on the site I could change that to a greater number so I wasn't looking at just 20 at a time I had a church website that was deciding on which Bible quote to plug into you so they had 10 of them on there trying to decide when they picked one they didn't delete the other nine so as a matter of kind of figuring out how they were doing that it was a little bit of a hunting and figuring it out but putting them all in one page made a little bit easier to navigate through that option and again you can turn on the description or turn off the description which will just make your list a little bit shorter if you've got the plugin description toggled off when you look at your users you can turn on or off the number of posts that they have the role that they have or their email address it's not a whole lot to change but it might make a difference to you if you're looking at hundreds of users because you have a subscription type service and maybe you have or maybe you're selling something through e-commerce and every time somebody creates an account they have a user name so you may have five you may have one you may have 500 it really depends on how your structure is set up and how you have people logging into your site and something as simple as subscribing to a service creates a user account so being able to look at those things and sort by those different kinds of roles can be very important another thing that happens sometimes as you end up with all kinds of spam on your system and suddenly you've got all of these users that you've never seen before with email addresses that don't make sense so if you sort by user role you can delete great groups of people all at once if they don't belong on your site so being able to do that is important when you're in a post you have post options so if you look at the right hand card that's over there it gives you the ability to be published or not published in review you can stick your post to the front page which is going to override the chronological ordering that has to do with the way WordPress posts in the blog section or puts posts together so you can stick one at the top why you might like to do that could be any number of reasons maybe you're using your posts for upcoming events but there's one big event that you want people to see maybe the post at the top is an explanation of how the the rest of the post go and what your blog is about so you may want to post something and have it stick to the very top and you can do that by creating a sticky post you can password protect posts so that only people who have that password can access that that same area you can make them private and so you can actually set privacy based on user roles and how you use your user roles in your website and then you can also change the publication date one of the things I do with customers who say they want to blog as I say I'm not going to create a blog for your website until you can give me 12 posts because very many customers think that blogging is wonderful they write two or three articles and then it just stagnates so if they can give me 12 articles I know I've got a year's worth of content at least at posting one per month and then they can add the rest as they go but what I can do is I can predate all of those posts so that they don't go out all at once so they aren't starting with a blog that has 12 published posts on it but can be spread out throughout the year so if you put a date on there that's in the future at that date and time that you indicate is when that post will go live page options works very much the same you can change the status again published pending reviewer draft you can password protect a page I've done that for different organizations you can again set the privacy to a page based on user roles you have a publication date again you can put that date in the past you can put that date in the future and you can revise so with you there's revisions on pages that you can say I made a change I didn't mean to make that change I deleted a whole bunch of content and now I don't know how to get it back all you have to do is look through your revisions and as long as you haven't been deleting them as you go you'll have the ability to go back and repopulate that content or copy and paste from the revision to put into the new way that you've established that page so if you have made an update to a page and you wish you hadn't all is not lost because you do have the ability to scroll back through your visions and take a look it's kind of fun sometimes to look at how that page has evolved over time it's kind of like your very own way back machine right within your own website if you don't know what the way back machine is go to archive.org and look at some of the first websites you've ever developed it's kind of like the walk of shame through your website development because the very first website I ever built was completely out of front page and it was in the late 90s and it was all black white text it was for a country western singer and all you saw were her eyes on the front page and so I every once in a while I'll throw back Thursday we'll go back into the archive screenshot that and post my shame because it shows how far I've come in my design it's kind of fun I challenge you to do that when you're in the editor itself you can see that you have all of these different buttons at the top of your editor window and if you've never played with them I'm here to tell you what they do so and some of them will depend some of them appear or disappear based on the themes you have but most of them are pretty consistent throughout all the theming that I've seen so obviously you've got your ways that you can do a bolding italics strike through etc the one that's just a line actually just adds a horizontal line so maybe you want to break up your text somehow I have a site that had a bunch of testimonials and so we put a line in between each testimony on a testimonial page for them you have a read more it looks like a little road like don't cross the yellow line in the middle kind of thing but that's the read more it adds a read more tag so if you have a blog post or you have a blog and it's not truncating down it says not giving you just a snippet or a preview of your blog post this actually is a whole thing you can actually put this read more tag in there it'll only display everything above the read more tag people can click through and then get the whole post so it makes a little bit easier to scroll down through your blog and not see every word of every post as you go the toggle toolbar have you ever gone into your editor and you only see that top line and you're like how do I find h1h2 well that toggle toolbar at the end is how you open up that second line of editing in your editing window it used to be called the kitchen sink I thought that was a way more fun title for it but I guess it wasn't as descriptive I still refer to it sometimes as the kitchen sink but that's the toggle toolbar give you that second line of editing options pasting as text is a wonderful tool if you write in any kind of word processing so you're using word for example word has its own hidden markup often and if you paste into word press sometimes that comes along with it and then you go to look at your page and everything looks a little wacky because it's pulling in things that you didn't necessarily want to include so if you paste this text it gets rid of all that extra things takes out all that formatting and just puts the text by itself yes if you copy and paste from word into into word press use that paste as text but you can also highlight and clear the formatting so if you highlight a paragraph you clear formatting it's going to clear out that formatting for you and then you can go ahead and format within word press itself using word presses tools the ABC we've seen that all over the place that's proofreading your writing so you can actually click that little button it will help you proofread through the Omega looks like a horseshoe up there that's special characters so if you want an m-dash or an m-dash or you want the registered trademark symbol you can click that little alpha I'm sorry Omega and it's going to give you a list of what those different things are and you can select from that list how to put those in your word press site so you don't have to go googling how to get that registered trademark or copyright symbol they're right there in that a special character list and then if you want to know what the keyboard shortcuts are just hit that little question mark I'm going to have a slide a little bit later that's going to show you what that does but that's what that does is it gives you some keyboard shortcuts for yourself more editor option editor options are text editing versus visual editing so if you're visual editing it's kind of a what you see is what you get so you're bolding something it looks bold if you click over to the text editor you're going to see the markup language that goes with that so you're not going to see bolded text you're going to see strong in some carrots and then you're going to see your text and then you're going to see slash strong and lowercase at the other end and that's going to say that everything between that should be bolded but you're going to see that markup language so if you're using hypertext if you're using images you're not going to see the images under the text editing you're going to see the reference to it and how it's pulled into your site it's pretty cool actually and when and sometimes you actually have to use that so for example if you're pulling in YouTube videos and you've copied the iframe from YouTube you have to paste that in at the text editing side you can use the URL and not do it you can use the URL on the visual side but if you're using the iframe you have to do it on the text editor side otherwise you're going to see just that markup language in your visual side so you do have to use that text editor and then that little x that actually has these arrows going every way is what that distraction free writing is that I talked about so what that does is it strips out all of the editor features and just gives you a big window to write in some people love that I like to be able to see all my tools so I I've never used that except to explore it but that's something that some people really appreciate especially bloggers who are writing right on their site and not writing elsewhere first one of my favorite things is the quick edit features because you can quickly edit something without actually having to open the whole poster page so let's say I've got a site of I've got a page and I want to put it back to draft status I don't have to open the whole page click over to the right hand side change it from published to draft I can do it as a quick edit so if I hover over the title of the page or the post it'll let me click you know choose trash or edit it'll also let me quick edit and you can see some of the things you can change with quick editor are the slug which is the right the permalink you can change the date the author I made the mistake once of putting in a whole bunch of articles I imported a whole bunch of articles to a new customer from their old website and I published it for her to look at and every single one of those articles was written by me suddenly because I was the only one who had a log into her site and so I quickly was able to hide to check every single one of those posts and with one quick edit I was able to change all of the editing all of the authorship for all of those to her very quickly without having to open post by post by post that's a really nice little feature so I told you that none of the hidden features are actually hidden except this one so this link that I'm showing you here there's no link there's no place in your website that you can get to this quickly but and I always say this with great response or with great with power comes great responsibility if you start making changes on this link you can do some real damage to your website if you don't know what you're doing but this is your options that PHP and you can make a ton of changes there if you're a developer you love this screen because this was able to give you some quick edits to some of the ways that your site works but I say look at it get an idea of what it does but don't go around making a whole lot of changes on this one unless you really want to reinstall your website this lady is shortcut so I told you I was going to show you some of those instead of having to pull down or do that drop down to hit those different headings those header you can just use hashtags so if you put two hashtags it automatically makes the text following that a header to three hashtags makes it a header three if you want to do a block quote all you have to do is that carrot that's pointing in that to the right and so when a carrot points to the right it's automatically creates a block quote if you use a asterisk you start to make a bulleted list if you put a dot before something you make a numbered list so it's just quick shortcuts on your keyboard ways to make things go much faster than having to use your mouse or your thumb pad to go ahead and use those drop downs some of the other miscellaneous shortcuts and again I promise this this the link to all of these slides is coming up so you can see if you're in now to use these shortcuts you actually have to be in your text editor but you can create a non-breaking space by using the ampersand and BSP semi colon and that will create a non-breaking space in your list you can use the less than greater than you can see if there's things that you can't find on your keyboard quickly like the sent sign pound euro etc there's a link an entity name and number for you to be able to do that one of my favorite things is favoriting plugins if you have a login to wordpress.org and you should all create a login to wordpress.org as you search for different plugins to do what you're looking for you can favorite them by clicking that little heart that you see up there when you click the heart a beautiful thing happens you're logged into your website you go to add plugin you can click favorites it's going to do it slowly for you on the screen click the favorites and then type in your username from wordpress.org and all of those that you've favorited with the heart show up on that list makes it easy you can install them and activate them right from there you don't have to remember what the name is you like I had this SEO plug and I don't remember but I favorited it boom there it is it's a great thing we also have help screens so you can pull down that help screen next to the screen options and you get all kinds of different links you can link to the codex you can link to YouTube videos and things that wordpress has built in for you to be able to get a little extra help and understand how your wordpress website works one of the things that wordpress has added in the last year is on your main dashboard this upcoming wordpress events and news how many of you have used this have seen this that's wonderful right so you get to that exactly fantastic it works Courtney will be happy I gave this talk in San Diego earlier this year and she said that was my project I worked on that and you mentioned it I said that's awesome so yeah absolutely it shows you you can see my trails at the top because I just screen grabbed this yesterday your Thursday and it shows you work at Niagara Lehigh Valley is coming up if there's meetups that are coming up in your area that also show up there so you'll be able to see when the next word camp I'm sorry when meetup Montreal is coming up for wordpress and then the thing that I always like to say we're kind of hiding amongst ourselves but the wordpress community is the biggest hidden gem of all because we have the ability to help each other in amazing ways to learn and grow from one another so if you're not part of the Montreal meetup you should be join the meetup show up learn share there's a million things that you can do there you can come to word camps like you are today I think this is my 10th word camp this year so far I love them I love traveling and I love being able to meet people and share my passion for wordpress we have co-working I'm from Rochester New York and we have co-working once a month so we find a space from nine to four and we all work in the same environment we help each other out somebody will say hey does anybody know of a plug-in that does this somebody else knows and so we help each other out all day long that way we have hackathon once a year in Rochester where we build websites for non-local nonprofits we get there at 9 by 5 they have web the website that's already published on the web and something they can go forward with you can participate in the wordpress.org forums I've answered questions in the forums it always makes me feel like an expert in my field when I'm able to help somebody that way and also you can participate in the community by asking for help you aren't in this all by yourself there are a whole bunch of us who really do like to help each other out and show you the way that of doing things that you'd like to do and then of course help somebody else out along the way as well I'm Michelle Ames I'm the head of customer success for give if you want to learn more come see me but anything we talked about today your questions about anything and that's my email my Twitter Instagram and slide share is all at Michelle Ames so slideshare.com slash Michelle Ames you'll find all these slides and all my other talks that I've given as well and I think I have a few minutes left for questions so if you have questions I'm here yes it's it's only per website and it's only per user so if you change the screen options for you the other users can change it for themselves and they don't affect each other yeah good question yes but so the question was that if you use that paste this text or remove the formatting it doesn't take out the spacing no what it the formatting it removes is it removes anything like bolding it removes italics or removes any specific fonts that you've installed that you have that you're working in the word set word site but not in word press other questions well I will be in the happiness bar after this so if you do have questions or anything I can answer for you I'm happy to do that thank you for having me in Montreal this weekend it's been a pleasure