WordPress in an Hour or Less: The Get It Done Guide to Installing and Using WordPress (11 page)

A closing tip
for this chapter: Take the time to search for the plug-ins that will work best for you. Because plug-ins vary so widely in terms of what they offer, one person's plug-in trash can literally be another's person's plug-in treasure. A good way to start is to go to the plug-ins page of the WordPress foundation, at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
and click the 'Most Popular' link at the far right. When the displ
ay of the most popular plug-ins appears, scroll down and read the details about each plug-in listed, and install every one that interests you. Then take a look at the documentation and see if you can get your newly-added plug-ins fully operational.

In this chapter, you'll learn how you can add media-- pictures, graphics, audio and video clips-- to your WordPress site.  In today's visual world, web sites that get the attention of viewers cannot be based purely upon text.  And you will need plenty of graphics, and quite possibly audio and video, to cook up websites that truly sizzle.  WordPress gives you plenty of tools to integrate such elements of multimedia into a web site.

You can use images in a number of different ways throughout your WordPress site, and WordPress makes it easy with its built in Media Library that supports drag-and-drop upload capability.  WordPress can even resize your images and create thumbnails automatically.

For a post or a page, first place the cursor where you want the image to appear.  Then click on the media icon that is directly above the WordPress editor toolbar
(see the image that follows).

When you click the icon, the Add Media box appears, shown here:

You can drag and drop files from an Explorer window, or you can click the Select Files button to open a Select Files dialog where you can browse to the desired location on your hard drive and select the file.  (The drag-and-drop feature only works with the latest HTML-5 compatible browsers such as newer versions of Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.) Once you select a file, WordPress will upload the image.  After it has been uploaded, you get a chance to edit various settings before adding the image to the Media Library (see below).

Use Title to specify information that appears as a tool tip when the mouse is held stationary over the image.  Use Caption to enter text that will appear directly underneath the image when it is displayed.  The Description text will be shown along with the image in the Dashboard and with any attachments that you include at your site, and you can use the Link URL entry to specify another object on the web that the image should be linked to.

Of particular interest are the Size choices that you're presented with.  The dialog box provides you with four options: thumbnail, medium, large, and full-size.  When you select the size for a graphic image, WordPress does not just resize your existing file.  Instead, it creates a new file using the size parameters that you specify.  Finally, you are given alignment choices of none, left, center, and right.

Once you have made any desired changes to these settings, click the Insert Into Post button, to add the image to the post or page.  The following illustrations show a photograph inserted into a WordPress page, both in the Edit view and as the actual view that a visitor to the site would see.

Note that if you wish to place a graphic into a sidebar or in a footer, you will need to use a different procedure.  You'll need to upload the graphic to the Media Library, then use some HTML coding to place the image in a text widget that you can then add to the sidebar.  How to do this is detailed back in the previous chapter, under the heading "Adding an Image to a Text Widget."

You can use the same techniques outlined previously under 'Adding an Image to a Post or a Page' to add audio or video clips to your WordPress site.  You can add audio files that are stored in the common .MP3 file format, and you can add video files that are stored in the common .MP4 file format.  (Video clips that you upload in this manner must be relatively short, as there are file size limitations you will encounter when using the Insert Media feature of WordPress; however, there are ways around these limitations, as the following chapter topic will illustrate.)

To add audio files or video clips, open the page or post in Edit View, click the Insert Media link, and either drag and drop the .mp3 file (for audio) or the .mp4 file (for video), or just use the Select File button to locate the audio or video file on your hard drive.

Once the audio file or video clip has been uploaded to WordPress, you will see the file name and the file type along with text fields for the entry of a title, a caption, and a description, as shown below.

Make any desired edits to the fields, then click 'Insert into Post' to add the file to your post or page.  When you view the page in a browser, it will contain the text that you entered into the title field, displayed as a link.  Click the link, and the audio file or video clip plays.

One of the most popular ways to host video on a server other than your own (and thereby get around the size limits imposed by the Insert Media feature of WordPress) is to host it on YouTube.  You can go to YouTube (
www.youtube.com
) and set up your own YouTube account, and upload your own videos to the YouTube site.  Once you have uploaded the videos, you can easily insert or "embed" those videos in your WordPress site posts or pages.  (You don't have to be a member of YouTube to use YouTube videos on your WordPress site; you will only need to sign up with YouTube if you want to use your own videos, as opposed to someone else's videos.) At the time of this writing, any YouTube member can upload videos of up to 15 minutes in length. (YouTube members who are in good standing can apply with YouTube to have those limits increased to up to 12 hours; see the Help section of the YouTube site for details.)

Whether the YouTube video is your own, or someone else's, you can easily embed that video into a post or page within WordPress.  Just use the steps that follow:

1. Go to YouTube.com, and locate the video that you want to embed in WordPress.

2.  At the bottom of the YouTube video, you will see Like and Share buttons.  Click Share.

3.  The window beneath the video will expand, and you'll see an Embed button.  Click Embed.

4.  A code window will open, displaying highlighted HTML code that you will need to embed the YouTube video.  Also, you will see options below the code that let you choose a size for your YouTube video, as shown here.