More WordPress Tips and Tricks

As a continuation of the previous post about The Benefits of Tagging Your Post, I’m going explain some hidden features of WordPress that you may or may not have known before. In this post, I’m going to cover “Alt + V” or the second WordPress Formatting interface, which is helpful for copy and pasting from MS Word or Notepad, or any other text editor. I’m also going to cover the usage of the <!–more–> tag.

• Copying from MS Word to WordPress: If you’re anything like me and kind of enjoy working in the visual editor, you probably get REALLY pissed off when trying to copy documents from MS Word or Notepad and seeing the messed up format it produces. I know I shouldn’t work in Word, but when my Internet is down, I don’t want to risk losing my work. Here’s a quick fix to all of the unnecessary coding Office throws in.
  1. In the Visual View option, press Alt + V. If this pops up your Browser’s view toolbar, click back into the WordPress editor and press Shift + Alt + V. You should notice more options available to you. You should notice something that resembles a briefcase with a W on it. Click that, and paste your text in there.
  2. Next, press Insert and let the pop-up window paste the text in the WordPress editor.
  3. If that doesn’t do the trick, press Control + A and click on the icon that resembles a sweeper. It will clean up all the necessary code to give you faster loading times. If you want you can manually reformat everything, but it should be fine by now.
  4. Voila! You’ve just imported a file from MS Word into WordPress and the formatting WILL NOT BE MESSED UP!
• The “Split Post with More Tag” : Worried that one post takes up too much room on your front page? Wish you could have more posts on your page, giving readers an option to sort through different articles faster? Not to worry! In just a few quick steps, you’ll have a convenient “more” link that gives readers a link to read more of your post without interfering with those who want to just browse the front page.
  1. The easiest way to do this is probably by going to the visual tab. On the right side of the screen, you should see something that looks like two white boxes. It’s right next to the “insert/edit image” button, as you can see from the diagram.
  2. Click on this button, and you should see an image on your visual screen. It might not be what you want, but don’t worry about it - when you hit publish, it’ll work out fine.
  3. Go to the “Code” option, and use the Find tool of your browser. It’s usually “Control + F,” then type in “–more” and you should see the tag for it (<!–more–>. You can edit this to any text you want, if the classic “read more…” doesn’t satisfy you.
  4. To do this, you follow the –more with a space, then type in what you want to say, and follow that with another space. For example, if I wanted my tag to say “read more or you’ll regret it!” I would make the tag: “<!–more read more or you’ll regret it! –>. This can be helpful if you want to entice readers into reading your post.
  5. Just make sure you give the readers enough of an idea of how your post will look prior to putting in this more tag! The difference between this and hyperlinks is EVERYTHING, so don’t even bring that up.
  6. Just a quick note about these <!–more–> tags; in RSS feeds, it will cut off your post UNLESS you download a plugin. The one I used can be found here. Just drag it into the Plugins section via FileZilla, and activate the plugin.

There are a lot more tips and tricks to WordPress, so stay tuned for more updates in the future!