Today we learn more about your CMS-driven website, including changing themes, post types, logos, and comment moderation, and then we'll start on our final assignments!
Quick links: Assignment 2 and The Final Assignment
Remember last week when I said, "blogs begat Wordpress"? This is important to know, because Wordpress considers every discrete content object you create to be a "post". Pages, blog entries, even documents, images and menu items - as far as Wordpress is concerned, these are all "posts".
Of course, all of these things are used in different ways, and therefore fall into different categories. In Wordpress lingo, these different categories are "post types" (sometimes called "content types" - same thing).
One of the best ways to make Wordpress really dance is to create "custom post types", but that requires learning some PHP, or at least installing a plugin, neither of which are something we're going to do today (or have the option to do with a free Wordpress.com site).
Instead, what we'll do is use a post type that comes with some of the themes on Wordpress.com: the portfolio post type.
The portfolio post type isn't drastically different from the "page" post type. If you know how to make a new page, you know how to make a portfolio post.
The difference, as we'll see, is how Wordpress categorizes these portfolio posts.
First thing we're going to do today: change our theme to a theme that is compatible with the portfolio post type.
After activating a new theme, you may find that your content doesn't "sit" the same way - adjust as necessary.
Last week, we only briefly touched on some of the ways to make a theme "customized". Head back to your dashboard and let's look at the options.
Now that we're done that big detour through brand assets, let's take advantage of our new post type and create some portfolio posts.
Add some text, and then try adding a different kind of block by clicking on the "plus" button.

While you're at it, let's dig into the options in the right-hand menu, and upload a "featured image" for this portfolio post. That's the image that will show up on our Portfolio page to represent this post.

There's one more step before your portfolio posts will be accessible - you need to put your portfolio page in the menu. This is the same process we did last week for getting a page into the main menu.
Head back to your dashboard, and click on "My Home" to bring up the "Quick links" menu, or, in the left-hand menu, click on DesignAppearance > Customize. This will bring you to the customization screen, where you can choose "Menus".
Alright, let's take a look at Assignment 2 and The Final Assignment
A "brand asset" is any media used exclusively for identifying a brand - this could include things like digital logos and banners, but also audio jingles or video titles.
Today we'll generate some brand assets!
I'm going to introduce you to a tool that's going to make our lives a little easier, but first I want to explain to you why I trust this tool.
There are a few ways that I might implicitly trust strangers on the internet who want to lend me their expertise:
The service I'm going to have us use today falls into that third category. Shopify Opens in a new window, for those of you who haven't heard of them, is a massive company that gives people tools for building online retail. They can afford to provide tools, like the one we'll be using today, pro bono as a form of advertising for their paid services.
Head over to hatchful.shopify.com Opens in a new window and let's generate some logos.
Fair warning: these logos are bland and generic. If you're a graphic designer, you'll probably want a logo that is, you know, good. And fair enough. However, using the Hatchful service is going to show us something very handy when it comes to generating brand assets, and the process only takes a few minutes, so bear with me.
Remember a few moments ago when I said, "the Hatchful service is going to show us something very handy when it comes to generating brand assets"? This is it!
See, it's not enough to have one copy of your logo, especially when it comes to social media.
Hatchful generates a whole ton of different versions of your logo, with different sizes and aspect-ratios. These are to accommodate the optimal dimensions for different contexts on different platforms, from a pin on a Pinterest board, to a Twitter profile picture, to a linkedIn banner.
So, even if you're already designing your own logos in Figma, these assets we just generated are a very handy reference for the types and dimensions of the assets you'll need to generate.
Upload the file called favicon.png. A "favicon Opens in a new window" is the tiny logo that appears in the browser tab for your website.

Congratulations! Your site now has multiple brand assets in place!
Now, when you hear the phrase "internet comment section", you probably think, "hive of scum and villainy". You're not wrong.

You'll want to get acquainted with the Wordpress comment settings so that you can moderate incoming comments (or, much more likely, disable them entirely).
For the sake of experimentation, mess around with the comment settings all you like, but don't disable them entirely. The one toggle I'll direct you to set is Comment must be manually approved. Set this to the "on" position.
The home pages provided to you by your theme are... fine. But let's give ourselves some credit and create our own home pages.
You've also got the option to select specific categories and tags to display on the front page.
But what does that even mean? What are categories and tags, how does Wordpress use them, and what the heck is the difference?
As you might have guessed, both categories and tags are ways to classify posts. While they share a lot of the same functions, they should be treated as tools coming from opposing angles for the purpose of classification. Categories are the giant cleaver, and tags are the tiny, precise scalpel.
Categories are broad subjects - every post should fall into a category, but if you're putting posts into more than, say, two categories, your categories will lose meaning. The purpose of categories are to divide your posts up into a few groups.
Your categories should be defined so that all the content of a post falls into that category. If your posts were pages in a book, the category would be the chapter title.
Your users should be able to head to a category to discover content.
Tags are for very specific classifications of content. Go ahead, put tons of tags on your posts.
Your tags should capture any subjects that are covered anywhere within a post. The purpose of tags are to supplement site search, so that, even if it's not apparent from the title or summary of a page, users know if a subject is mentioned in the post.
If your posts were pages in a book, the tags would be the index at the back of the book that lets your users find buried content.
Creating tags and categories is pretty easy.
One cool thing about categories and tags is that they automatically generate pages that list all the posts with the same tag or within the same category.
Let's take advantage of that by learning how to add them (and any other link!) to our menu.
Click on "Categories" or "Tags" to see a list of your categories and tags. If you add one of them to the menu, it will add a link to a page that lists all posts within that category or tag.
Comment settings
One more thing I want us to look at today: comments.