If you are a WordPress user, you probably spend most of your time in the admin visual editor, writing posts and sharing your content.
The visual editor gives you the possibility to create ‘What You See Is What You Get’ content. Its environment is quite intuitive even for the newest WordPress users.
But why not to make it more useful?
Since you’re already spending so much time in it, you could get more familiarized with some of the ‘hidden gems’ of visual editing.
This article shows you specific visual editing tricks that will improve your WordPress experience. Try them and watch how your productivity is increasing.
1. The Kitchen Sink button
Usually, users tend to neglect this button most of the time. What they don’t know is that by clicking this button you will open a very rich set of additional hints and buttons.
In the opened row, you can find all the necessary tools to do text formatting. In order to know what is the function of each button, hover the mouse pointer over it and check the usage signal that pops automatically.
2. The ‘Mysterious’ buttons
‘Mysterious buttons’ are those options that haven’t been incorporated in the kitchen sink but are still necessary for you to easily perform visual editing.
Rely on the stalwart horizontal rule form ’90 web design, for instance. In order to have your personal <hr/> button, you should go to functions.php and paste this code:
functionenable_more_buttons($buttons) {
$buttons[] = 'hr';
return $buttons;
}
add_filter("mce_buttons", "enable_more_buttons");
You are the one in charge of choosing buttons or selecting areas where a specific visual editing action should be performed.
Here comes a full list of buttons that can be added: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, justifyleft, justifycenter, justifyright, justifyfull, bullist, numlist, outdent, indent, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, link, unlink, image, cleanup, help, code, hr, removeformat, formatselect, fontselect, fontsizeselect, styleselect, sub, sup, forecolor, backcolor, charmap, visualaid, anchor, newdocument, and separator.
3. Managing typography
Typography is a significant aspect of your web content because it can ‘make or break’ the way readers perceive your style. You need to explore between different styles and sizes, to attract attention and create a visual hierarchy of your content.
Within the visual editor, you’re allowed to adjust the font size of the first six paragraphs or headings. The same text can be formatted into bold, italic, or underlined sentences, or aligned as you wish. To change the size, you have to highlight the text you want to adjust select the option you need from the drop-down menu.
4. Managing links
Another important thing that every WordPress user should know is how to add/remove hyperlinks from his posts. In order to add one, you should click on Insert > Edit link and insert the hyperlink. The same option is used to modify or replace the existing links.
Once you’ve clicked the button, a screen will appear in which you’ll have to enter both the title of the page (assuming that you know what the link is about), and its URL.
An additional benefit of the process is that you can provide readers with more options (opening the link in a new window, for instance). An important thing to remember is that the hyperlink is not a part of your content, but an external source of additional information.
For adding internal hyperlinks, you have to click on the “Or link to existing content”. The tool is mostly used to relate the existing text to your another page or someone else’s WordPress blog post.
The platform will assist you by populating recent links/titles for you to choose from. But keep in mind that WordPress will take time to locate even the latest post connected to your content, so you have to be patient.
5. Leaving the text unformatted
One of the things that can certainly be perceived as WordPress’s weakness is the difficulty of handling pre-formatted texts brought on it from another text editor. As dull as it sounds, working with plain text is the best option for WordPress. The button that you could use to remove all formation from an imported text is ‘Clear Formatting’.
First of all, highlight the specific text then click on the button. But remember that the best way to do this is to import the text unformatted. Keep in mind that this WordPress feature doesn’t deal with headers or block quotes. Also, there are other formatting buttons in WordPress, but they are much more complicated.
6. Single and double line spacing
The eternal struggle for beginners (even in MS Office Word) is to learn how to divide textual content into paragraphs, or how to use line breaks. WordPress developers tried to simplify this for us: a new paragraph with double line spacing can be created by only pressing the Enter tab.
On the opposite, a line break with single line spacing, can be added by pressing ‘Shift’ and ‘Enter’ keys simultaneously.
7. Shortcuts
WordPress visual editor allows you to use almost every formatting shortcut you may know from MS office. The reason why people use them is to save time. Most of them are associated with the Ctrl tab (or Command for Mac users):
Ctrl + b = Bold
Ctrl + i = Italic
Ctrl + c = Copy
Ctrl + v = Paste
Ctrl + x = Cut
Ctrl + a = Select All
Ctrl + z = Undo
Ctrl + y = Redo
Ctrl + [number] = Insert heading sizes, e.g. CTRL+1 = <h1>, CTRL+2 = <h2>.
Alt + Shift + n = Check Spelling
Alt + Shift + l = Align Left
Alt + Shift + j = Justify Text
Alt + Shift + c = Align Center
Alt + Shift + d = Strikethrough
Alt + Shift + r = Align Right
Alt + Shift + u = Unordered List
Alt + Shift + a = Insert link
Alt + Shift + o = Numeric List
Alt + Shift + s = Remove link
Alt + Shift + q = Quote
Alt + Shift + m = Insert Image
Alt + Shift + w = Full screen distraction free writing mode
Alt + Shift + t = Insert More Tag
Alt + Shift + p = Insert Page Break tag
Alt + Shift + h = Rich text editor help
8. Enabling the ‘Distraction-Free’ mode
Isn’t it really annoying to deal with so many menu items disposed around your writing board? You can always simplify your interface by hiding these options from the page where you’re writing your posts. You have to click on the ‘Distraction-Free writing mode’, and all choices will simply disappear. It’s a great way to reduce stress and increase focus.
9. Using special characters
Special character is a specific WordPress button that allows you to add specific symbols, like registration signs, trademarks or copyright indicators in your posts. All you have to do is to click this toolbar icon, and you’ll see a popup with special characters to choose from. Select the one you like, and it will instantly appear in the editor.
10. Adding media content
Another thing that makes WordPress visual editor a great deal is the easiness of uploading media content (images, videos) to your posts. All you have to do is to select the Add Media button, open the Media Library, and choose your file.
It can either be a file that is already there, then you don’t need to look for it in specific folders in order to attach it to our post. Or, if it’s a file you’ve never used before, click on the ‘Upload files’ tab, get the file, and click ‘Insert’. Also, WordPress allows you to ‘attach’ metadata on your file, like titles or alt text, used for SEO purposes.
The file you’re inserting will be placed on the last location of your cursor, but this is something you could change. In order to do it, you should click on the file (the image, for instance), and check the horizontal bar with editing and alignment options that will appear next to it. WordPress also supports the drag-and-drop technique to help you position files exactly where you want them to be.
These tips will definitely help you improve your blog posting experience. If you have other hacks about working with the WordPress admin area, please share them through a comment below.