OSTips-Speed Up Creating WordPress Posts & Pages

Quickly Create Joomla Websites With Your Own Distribution

in this episode, I’m gonna help you make creating your WordPress posts and pages go even faster. If you’re like me, you love the new Gutenberg editor.  Being able to drag and drop all of those different elements into a post or a page is really really easy, but if I’m creating the same kind of content over and over again like a blog with the same layout – say an image, then a paragraph, then a heading,  another paragraph, and then maybe a quote or however you want to basically always create your posts or pages, all that dragging and dropping is really a hassle.

I’m gonna show you two really simple ways to make that go a whole lot faster: 1) reusable blocks, or 2) a simple plugin.

Let’s go!


“Hi and welcome to OSTips from OSTraining. I’m Rod Martin.

So there’s a couple of ways to do this.  I’m gonna show you what I think is the best way first, and then I’ll hit on what I think is the second best way to do this.

Let’s head over to posts, and create a new post.

This is a brand new WordPress site. I haven’t done anything on it, so I’m just going to go ahead and add a few blocks for my standard blog layout.  I’m just gonna click and add a few of the blocks that I would normally use.

  1. an image
  2. a paragraph (I’m just going to type in sample text in here)
  3. a heading
  4. some columns
  5. a media
  6. a text

You’ll notice that I’m using blocks from the most used category, but you’ll find these under any of the other elements like layout elements for the columns and things like that.  You get the idea.  Let’s just say this is how I would normally lay out my blog posts.

From here all I need to do is select all of the blocks that I’ve created.

Now if you don’t see the three little dots here, no worries. Head over to the hamburger menu and click on top toolbar.  You’ll want to see the top toolbar here.

To get these other icons to show,

  • click on these three dots or hamburger menu
  • click Add to reusable blocks
  • give it a name (I’m going to just call this standard blog layout)
  • click Save

Now these blocks have been saved as a group of reusable blocks.  Let me demonstrate.

I’m going to head back over to the home page,

  • click add new
  • click on the plus
  • change most used to reusable (you’ll see my standard blog layout)
  • click on that option

Here is my standard blog layout.  All of the blocks I’ve already pre-configured are ready to go.

Note: I can’t edit this at this point because it’s a reusable block, but this is simple to fix.

  • click on the hamburger menu
  • click convert to regular block

So this involves  a couple of clicks, but still my layout is done and it’s easy to update. Now I just go ahead and update it like I normally would any regular layout.

Reusable blocks save so much time over dragging and dropping and removing and adding individual blocks everytime just to get your layout right.  I’m going to encourage you to take all of the normal, repititous content that you do, and see if you can standardize some of these posts and then reuse them.

The second way of speeding up your posts and pages involves getting a plug-in called Duplicate Post.  You can NOT actually duplicate a post in WordPress out of the box, so you will need a plugin to perform this function.

I’ll install and activate the plugin. Now when I’m in posts and want to duplicate it, I can just click on clone apply.

Now I have my duplicate post.

And so that’s it!  You can either create the block layout that you love, save it as a reusable block, insert it in a new post, and convert back to normal blocks to edit, or yuo can use the duplicate post plug-in to just create a sample layout and clone it each time you want to start a new post.

Well thanks for watching.  This has been another OSTips video from OS Training.”

Author

  • Rod Martin

    Rod holds two masters degrees and has been training people how to do "things" for over 25 years. Originally from Australia, he grew up in Canada and now resides just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. He has worked in both the non-profit and for-profit worlds, in small companies and large corporations. His extensive open source experience includes WordPress, Joomla and Drupal and he really knows how to help you get the most out of the system you chose. Rod plays ice hockey a couple of times a week and rides his Goldwing motorcycle pretty much everywhere he can.

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