Sillybean

Editing Posts and Pages

You can filter the list of posts by category or date using the dropdown menus at the top of the list. You can also search your posts and pages using the box at the top right side of the Edit screens, but beware: it searches not only the titles but the complete content of posts and pages.

Autosave

WordPress does save your posts automatically, once per minute, as you write. However, if you try to publish or update a post while the autosave is running, you’ll get nowhere: the button is deactivated while autosaving. So how can you tell when it’s safe to hit the button? The button’s colors will fade out, but the effect is subtle: the button loses its three-dimensional, shadowed look and becomes a flat shade of blue. The button text becomes light blue instead of white (Figures 4-24 and 4-25) and a small donut-shaped progress indicator appears next to it.

When in doubt, check your browser’s status bar. Is the page reloading? If so, wait for the yellow Post updated message to appear at the top of the editing screen. If you pressed the button but the page isn’t reloading, try again.

By default, WordPress autosaves every sixty seconds if you’ve made changes in the content editor. You can adjust this timing by adding this line to your wp-config.php file:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 120 );  // autosave every two minutes

Screen Options

Like the Dashboard, the Edit Posts and Pages panels have Screen Options available. You can choose which columns you want to see; the post/page title will always display, but the author, categories, tags, comments, and date columns are optional. You can also choose how many posts or pages you’d like to see per page (Figure 4-26). Twenty is the default, but you can increase it if you have lots of content and you’d like to scroll through it faster. Keep in mind that the more posts or pages you put on each screen, the longer it will take WordPress to generate the screens.

Screen options are also available when editing individual posts and pages (Figure 4-27). If you’re working on a small screen or a monitor with a low resolution, you might want to switch your editing layout to a single column. You can also choose to disable boxes you don’t intend to use. For example, if your site doesn’t use custom fields, you might turn off that box so you don’t have to scroll past it to see the post revisions.

Quick Edit

If you need to change the attributes of a post or page without editing the content, you can do so quickly using the Quick Edit feature. Go to Edit Posts (or Pages) and hover your mouse over the post you want to modify. A row of links will appear below the title: Edit, Quick Edit, Delete, and View. Choose Quick Edit, and the table row will transform into a miniature editing form (Figure 4-28) that lets you change nearly everything about the page except the content, excerpt, and custom fields.

Bulk Edit

What do you do when you need to change the attributes of many posts or pages at once? Again, go to Edit Posts (or Pages). Select the checkboxes next to the posts you want to edit, then choose Edit from the Bulk Actions dropdown above the list of posts and press Apply. (If you want to select all the posts on the page, just use the checkbox in the gray table header.)

The Bulk Edit form (Figure 4-29) offers fewer options than Quick Edit. Things that would be illogical to change for multiple posts, like titles and publication dates, are not available. You can edit the categories and tags (for posts), parent and template (for pages), and the comment, trackback, visibility, and publication status settings.