WORDPRESS: How to use this stupid site from hell

There's no easy way to say this: WordPress will never work the way you want it to. Nor the way your instructors want it to. It crashes all the time, it's buggy, and for some reason it's still our main way to submit work in the Fine Arts program.

So here's a super bare-bones way to succeed in WordPress without really trying.

1. Do all of your edits straight from the page itself.

Doing things from the dashboard is stress-inducing and scary. Find your post, select "Edit Post" on the top menu bar.

2. Adding things to your post:

You can add so many things, but WordPress has preferences. When you click on the little plus sign in your post, click "Browse All".

Anytime you add something, the section is called a "block". You can change what kind of block you've added by clicking on the icon on the far left of the popup bar for that block.

The popup bar for paragraph blocks.

Paragraphs are the default block type, so any time you press enter you'll get a new paragraph that you can then change to be any other block if you want.

PDFs: PDF Embedder

Header: Type what you want your heading to be and then click on the Paragraph symbol on the left of the popup bar above your writing. Find and select "Heading". You can change the size or style of your heading after by selecting from "change level" in the popup bar.

Image + Gallery: It's best when uploading multiple images at once, to select "Media Library" and drop your files (.jpg is best, max size 250MB) straight into the "Upload" section. This way, WordPress already haas your images so when you try to create a gallery with them it has less of a chance to fuck it up.

Gallery blocks also have options within them like how large you want your pictures, how many pictures per line, etc. For these options you first need to select the entire gallery. Click anywhere in the gallery block, then when you hover over the multiple-images-icon in the popup, it should say "select gallery". In the top right of your editor, there's a square with a line through it, which will open your page settings. Here you can link your images to attachment pages, change their resolution, customize the number of columns in your gallery, and change the background colour of the block.

A lot of teachers like it when you make galleries easy to look through. You can do this by making the images "expand on click". Once you have your settings sidebar opened, select an individual image within your gallery block. Now, underneath "resolution" you should have a toggle button to "expand on click".

One more note for images: you can add captions to title your images easy peasy. Just click on your image and then in the popup bar there will be a square with dots in it. This will allow you to caption the image with your title or a description of what the image is about.

Videos are usually difficult to load in as a media piece because the file max is still 250MB. So instead, you can post it to YouTube and embed the video via a link. If you post it to YouTube, you can upload it as "unlisted" and copy/paste the URL into your YouTube embedder in WordPress. That way, only people who have the link can see your video and it won't be visible on your channel.

Page Breaks are under "Design" blocks, and are super helpful to separate your units into assignment pages within. You can't see them as an actual page break until you look at it from outside the editor, but it will show you a little dotted line where the break will be. From the outside, your post will have numbered pages at the bottom that you can click between.

MOST IMPORTANTLY

Update as you go, even if you're halfway through a post. If the site crashes or something happens, it's better to have something rather than nothing.

Feel free to comment if you have any other questions or things to add with basic WordPress uploading! Hopefully this was more helpful than the PDF they send out that no one looks at.

Coming soon: a post on how to make this website useful to you AFTER your graduate.