Entrepreneurial Writers: 6 WordPress Features You Should Know About

Here’s some of the top interesting things I’ve discovered from taking WordPress classes and messing around with it for the past few months!

1. Text Mode

Text mode can be helpful if your used to writing code and adding links. But even if you aren’t, it can still be helpful. Does the text look funky, or odd-sized? You may have copied and pasted something that kept the formatting. Check the text option mode for any weird code that inserts a font type or size and delete it!

2. Show/Hide Kitchen Sink

Another option if you’ve got some messed up formatting is to use the “remove formatting” tool, which looks like a little eraser and says “remove formatting” when you hover over it. Don’t see the second row? Hit the last button in the top row of the visual editor and it’s there! Other great tools here include paste from word and paste plain text option to avoid formatting errors.

3. Full-Screen Editor Mode

Ever get distracted easily while writing in your browser? I know I certainly do as I tend to switch back between social media, reading blogs and writing numerous blogs as well. Sometimes I will write in another editor, but when I want to write directly into WordPress for a quick post, it’s easy to use fullscreen mode. It’s located on the top row of options in the visual mode, second from the right. In text mode, it’s as simple as choosing “fullscreen” from the top.

4. Change Screen Options

This is by far one of my favorite WordPress features. I often get sick of all the things that clutter my screen. No matter what page you are in WordPress, you can change what you see on the screen, especially that pesky “Post Types” nobody tends to use.

5. Easy YouTube and Twitter Embedding

Use WordPress.com? They give you an easy way to quickly embed videos and tweets to your blog or website. While you could go and find embed codes (and you many still want to to be able to change the size) you can now just post the link directly into the WordPress visual editor like so (the URL just has to be on it’s own line). Grab the url for the tweet by clicking details and going to the tweet’s unique URL.

Self-hosted? Grab Youtube Embed codes from the video pages and tweet url’s by clicking more on the tweet’s page.

6. Jetpack Options

Move from WordPress.com to self-hosted and miss some of the features? Jetpack gives you back some of those. My favorites include Publicize (automatically posting your new posts to social media). Publicize can be easily turned on and off per individual post. Jetpack also gives you options like an easy option for a mobile site.