Hints and Tips

This page contains manuals and reference info for WordPress and Elementor, as well as hints, tips, and ‘how-to’s’.

WordPress Help & Advice

Images & Galleries

Adding Borders to Images

If you’ve added an image to your page using the ‘Image’ element in Elementor, it’s easy to add a border to your image. just do the following:

  1. Click the ‘Edit with Elementor’ link at the top of the page to go into the Elementor page editor
  2. Click on the Image element that you want to add a border to; the Edit image sidebar appears on the left.
  3. Click the ‘Style’ icon in the editor.
  4. Scroll down until you see the ‘border’ section. Set ‘border Type’ to solid, then set ‘Width’ to ‘1’.
  5. Optionally, you can also set a border radius, or change the colour of your border.
  6. Click the green ‘update’ button when you’ve finished to save your changes.

How to Edit Image Sliders

Image sliders/carousels, such as the one at the top of the ‘Photography’ page, can be edited in the following way:

  1. Go to the page with the image slider that you want to edit.
  2. Click ‘Edit with Elementor’ at the top of the page.
  3. Click on the slider element to activate the editor on the left hand side.
  4. To edit an existing item, click once on the item and it will open up, allowing you to edit the content. Click the green ‘Update’ button when you’ve finished.
  5. To add a new item, click the ‘Add Item’ button beneath the list of images. Complete all the details of the image, then click the green ‘Update’ button at the bottom of the editor.
  6. To delete an item, click the ‘X’ on right-hand-side of the image that you want to remove.
  7. To duplicate an image, click the ‘duplicate’ icon next to the ‘delete’ icon.

How to Edit Image Galleries

Image galleries in the ‘Photography’ section can be edited in the following way:

  1. Go to the page with the image gallery that you want to edit.
  2. Click ‘Edit with Elementor’ at the top of the page.
  3. Click on the gallery element to activate the editor sidebar on the left hand side.
  4. In the editor sidebar, you’ll see a section titled ‘General’. If the section is not expanded out by default, click on the little black arrow and the section will expand out.
  5. The first thing that you see is the list of image categories. Select the category that you want to edit by clicking on it. The category will expand out and when you hover over the image area, it turns grey and you’ll see a little pencil icon appear.
  6. To edit an existing gallery, click on the edit (pencil) icon to edit the images within that gallery. You can add to the gallery by selecting additional images by clicking the ‘Add to gallery’ link on the left hand side, or delete images by clicking the ‘X’ in the top right corner of the image. Click the ‘insert gallery’ link in the bottom right corner when you’ve finished editing, then click the green ‘Update’ button when you back in the main edit screen to save your changes.
  7. To add a new category, click the ‘Add Item’ button beneath the category list. Complete all the details of the category, then click the green ‘Update’ button at the bottom of the editor.
  8. To delete a category, click the ‘X’ on right-hand-side of the category that you want to remove.
  9. To duplicate an category, click the ‘duplicate’ icon next to the ‘delete’ icon.

YouTube & Videos

Embedding a YouTube video in a WordPress blog post or web page

Here are the steps on how to embed the video to the blog post or web page:

  1. In YouTube, first get the embed code. To get the embed code, go to the video hat you want to embed and click Share.
  2. After you've clicked Share, click on Embed,

    then click Copy.

  3. Once you've copied the code, go to the blog post, then click on the text view.
  4. When you are in the text view, you'll have to scroll down and look for "Watch the episode here"; place the code that you copied from YouTube where the

Sidebars

Editing Sidebar Content

The side bar (or sticky bar) is a template item that is composed of ‘widgets’. The widget content in the sidebar cannot be edited directly; the content is edited in the widget list under ‘default sidebar’ here:

Editing WordPress Posts & Pages

Editing Blog pages

If the 'Elementor' plugin is installed, most pages in WordPress can be edited in by clicking the 'Edit with Elementor' link in the black header bar at the top of the browser.

However, pages that are identified as ‘Blog’ pages cannot be edited using Elementor. They must be edited as follows (note that these instructions are for editing the content of the page itself, and NOT blog posts):

  1. click the ‘Edit page’ link at the top of the page.
  2. Once in the editor screen, scroll down and look in the sidebar on the right-hand-side until you see ‘Page attributes’. Select ‘default template’ from the drop down list, then immediately select ‘Modules’. You’ll see the ‘Modules’ section appear in the main editor area. (Text, Categories, and Posts modules typically.
  3. Click the ‘Edit’ link in the module that want to edit, then click the ‘Save’ button when you’re done, then click ‘Update’ when you get back to the main page editor.

Copy text into WordPress pages and posts

If you want to copy text content into a WordPress page or post that’s been written in another program, like MS Word for instance, copy the text into something like ‘Notepad’ first, then copy it from there into your WordPress page or post. Doing this will strip away all of the code that your typical word processor program adds to your text, meaning that you’re only pasting pure, unformatted code into your post, and not code or formatting that WordPress doesn’t understand.

Changing posts on the home page 'Featured' blog module

The blog listings section on the home page - where you see three posts listed together - actually consists of three separate modules, each set to display only one post which is a featured post, chosen by the administrator/editor.

To make this work, I've created three additional tags - 'Featured1', 'Featured2', and 'Featured3', and it's the actual posts that are configure to display, which is done as follows:

  1. Login to the website using an account with admin or editor permissions.
  2. Select the 'Dashboard' item from the black WordPress admin bar at the top of the page.
  3. Click the 'Posts' item in the left-hand black WordPress menu.
  4. Locate the post that you want to display in the center 'Featured1' module, then hover over it, and click the 'Quick Edit' link.
  5. Now in the 'Tags' section, type in 'Featured1', then click 'Update'. The post will now display in the Featured1 spot.
  6. Do the same for the post that you want to display in the 'Featured2' & 'Featued3' modules, except type 'Featured2' or 'Featured3' in the Tags section.
  7. To stop a post from displaying in either of the Featured modules, just delete the 'Featured1', 'Featured2', or 'Featured' tag from that post.
  8. Always check and make sure that you only have one post with the 'Featured1/2/3' tag at any one time.

Setting up post tags so that podcasts do not apear in the 'Latest' module

The 'Latest' module on the home page displays the latest (non-podcast) blog posts. However, the post grid module that creates this functionality is a little tricky to setup when it comes to excluding a particular post type, in that it doesn't work as its supposed to. In order to make it display latest posts but not podcast posts, you need to ensure that all non-podcast posts have the 'Writing & Blogging' tag added to their tag cloud, and that podcast post types do not.

Program Manuals and Documentation

WordPress General Help:

Elementor General Help:

Blog Designer General Help:

Blog Designer Help Files: https://www.solwininfotech.com/documents/wordpress/blog-designer/#introduction