ITC298 > Editing & Formatting Text in WordPress
Formatting your text in WordPress is fairly easy and intuitive if you have ever used any kind of computer software before.
Editing Your Text
When we go to edit our post, we will be taken back to to the Write Post SubPanel:
The Write Post SubPanel’s Rich Text Editor (RTE) looks like many of the software programs that you may be used to. Here is where you can make your text bold, italic, bulletted, etc.
The one difference here compared to your normal writing software is that you can also see what the HTML will look like for your post. You can even edit or input your own HTML if you’d like to.
Formatting Your Text
For now let’s add in a bit of formatting just for the fun of it.
The default toolbar doesn’t give us all of the options. So let’s open the “Kitchen Sink” by clicking the funny looking button on the end:
Now we should see all of the items that are available in the toolbar:
Now we can make some edits.
I am going to start out by simply making something bold:
It is as simple as highlighting the text I want to be bold and clicking the Bold button in the toolbar.
Creating a Text Link
Let’s say that I also want to make those words be a link to the page that I got this text from.
While the text is still highlighted, let’s click on the Link button:
When we click on the Link button, we will be shown the Insert/Edit Link dialogue box:
Here is where I can insert the link URL and choose for it to open in a new window when the user clicks the link. I can also add a title to the link that will show up as a tool tip when someone hovers over the link.
When we click the Insert button, we will see that a link has been applied to our chosen piece of text:
Viewing Your HTML
Any time that we are writing or editing a post, WordPress will translate what we have written into HTML that will then be written into our web page.
Let’s take a look at what WordPress has done to this post by clicking on the HTML button:
When we click on the HTML button, we will be shown how the HTML will be written into our web page:
Here we can see the anchor tags and strong tags around our text.
When we go to look at our post, we can see what our WordPress theme does with this information:
Now our piece of text is bold, red and clickable.