At the rapid rate WordPress is growing, when a new update becomes available, WordPress doesn’t mention or promote some of the awesome little bits and pieces it contains, which means that some features get overlooked.
I hope after reading this you learn at least a few things you don’t know about everyone’s favourite CMS.
1. Paste to Make a Link
This one is a cool little feature that not a lot of people know about. When in the visual mode in the post editor, you can select some text and paste to make the selected text a link. Usually, you would expect the selected text to be replaced with a link but this is not the case in WordPress.
2. Delete the Post Name to Regenerate It
If you rename a post before it is published, you’ll generally want to edit the link to make sure the post name follows the post title. If you click edit and just delete the whole thing the post name will be regenerated based on the current title.
Countless times have I retyped the permalink when I’ve changed the page title, definitely a time saver.
3. Screen Options Are per User
Screen options may be something you already know about, but probably don’t take advantage of. They are not only saved in cookies and in the database but are stored per user, which means that you can set up a completely different layout for yourself than others would see.
The cookie-database saving means that you can set up a specific layout on one computer and then log in from a different device and still see your own layout. This isn’t very well-communicated in the admin, which is why users seem to be afraid to use it.
4. Markdown-Style Shortcuts
As of WordPress 4.3, you can use markdown-like syntax to make your writing a lot faster. Stars and dashes make lists, hashes make titles and so on.
Take a look at the announcement for more details on how to use this feature.
5. Multi-Page Posts
You can use the < !–nextpage– > tag to split the content into multiple pages. WordPress will take all of your tags and generate the pagination based on them.
6. WordPress Has Image Editing Power
WordPress can perform basic image editing tasks like rotating, cropping and resizing. No filters just yet, but this feature is pretty useful if you need to rotate an image the right way up quickly.
Select an image and click on the edit image link near the image thumbnail in the details section and off you go. I’ve personally told some of my clients to use this facility which they love as they don’t need to come to me every time they need to make a quick tweak to an image that I would normally do in Photoshop.
7. WordPress Has a Filesystem API
Here’s one for the developers out there. The Filesystem API was created back in WordPress 2.6 to handle the auto-update features.
This is not one of those systems you’ll use every day, but when you need it, it’s nice to know there’s something in WordPress core to help you out.
8. Terms Have Metadata
As of the 4.4 release of WordPress, taxonomies now have metadata.
This includes a new wp_termmeta table complete with get_term_meta(), update_term_meta() and all the other usual suspects.
You can read all about it in the core developer teams 4.4 Taxonomy Roundup post.
9. Embed Third Party Content by Pasting a Link
WordPress uses oEmbed to allow you to embed Tweets, Vimeo and Youtube videos, Soundcloud and all sorts of other fun things in your content. In fact, you can just paste a link to the resource in question and it will be converted to an embed for you.
When version 4.4 is released, WordPress will become an oEmbed provider, so as long as you are running 4.4 and so is the blog you want ot target, you can even link to other WordPress sites’ content in this way.
And that wraps it up. If you know any cool hacks or obscure features in WordPress, let us know your tips in the comments below.