The Toolbar

This ‘Visual Editor’ tutorial covers:

• The tools in the ‘Visual Editor’
• Editing content in ‘Posts’ and ‘Pages’
• Content layout
• Revealing tools with the ‘Kitchen Sink” icon
• ‘Updating’ or ‘Publishing’ content

The ‘Visual Editor’ is the default content editor in WordPress. It works similar to a word processor, allowing you to see how formatting options will effect your content as they are applied.

The first row of tools has options for making text bold, italicizing and strikethrough–typically used for showing edits to a post or page. It also has tools for creating lists, formatting a quote, adding a dividing line, text alignment, creating links and breaking up how content is displayed on archive pages. To use these formatting options highlight the text you would like to apply the changes to or place the courser where you want to insert the element and click the formatting icon.

Clicking the ‘Toolbar Toggle’ icon reveals another layer of formatting tools. The first is a drop-down menu with options to create headers and format paragraphs. This is followed by the underline, justify and text color tools.

‘Paste Plain Text’ is for pasting content from any other text editor and removing any formatting that was added. You can use the ‘Clear Formatting’ button for removing formatting from a targeted group of text. The ‘Special Character’ icon provides a tool for inserting symbols like the ‘Trademark’ sign or the ‘Copyright’ sign.

The remaining options are for changing indentation and undoing and redoing changes. Click the question mark to reveal a list of keyboard shortcuts.

Introduce your users, clients or internal staff to the ‘Visual Editor’ in WordPress to let them better manage and develop their posts and increase the professionalism of your editorial service.