Knowledgebase
How to manage the settings and blocks on the form for adding and editing static pages in WordPress
In this article we'll briefly go over the additional blocks and settings on the form for adding/editing pages in WordPress. For some more general information on the Pages section of the admin panel read the tutorial on managing pages in WordPress (or the respective shorter article version). If you want to read a more detailed description of the settings on the add/edit page form accompanied by screenshots check out the tutorial on managing the blocks and settings on the add/edit page form in WordPress.
When in the admin panel you open the form for adding a new static page (Pages tab>Add New sub-tab) the only things you need to do to add a page are to type the title and content and click on the Publish button. There are some blocks with additional settings that you're not required to configure. These are: Publish, Page Attributes, Featured Image. After you publish the page two more blocks will appear automatically on the edit form: Comments, Revisions. There are also a few others that are hidden by default: Custom Fields, Discussion, Slug, Author. If you want to, you can make them visible on the add/edit page form or you can hide some of the default ones. To do this click on the Screen Options button in the upper right corner and mark/unmark the respective checkboxes in the panel that appears. Only the Publish block can't be removed from the form.
In addition to the button for publishing and updating pages the Publish block contains three other options. One is for the status of the page. Pages that have the status Draft or Pending Review are not shown on the frontend. There's also an option for the visibility of the page. By default, it's set to Public and the page can be viewed by anybody. If you want to, you can password protect the page or you can make it private. Private pages can be viewed only by registered users with the necessary permissions (e.g. administrators and editors).
The Page Attributes block has a drop-down menu labeled Parent from which you can choose another page to be the parent of the one you're adding/editing (in case you want the page to be a sub-page). Depending on the theme the block may also contain a Template drop-down menu from which you can change the page template. The templates that you can choose also depend on the theme that you use. There's a text field Order that can be used to manage the order of the pages in the various menus on the frontend. Those with a lower number are displayed first. You an use the Featured Image block to upload a featured image. Depending on the theme and the page template the featured image may or may not be displayed on the frontend.
The Comments block lists the page comments submitted by users and visitors on your site. Hovering the mouse pointer over the name of a comment will display under it some buttons with which you can approve/unapprove the comment, delete it, etc. The Revisions block show a list of all the revisions that you've made to the page.
The Custom Fields block can be used to add fields to the page. However, some code modifications also have to be made to display the fields on the frontend. An alternative is to use a third party plugin for managing custom fields. The Discussion block contains a couple of options. One is for enabling/disabling comments, and the other is for enabling/disabling trackbacks and pingbacks. These options will override the respective global settings (Settings tab>Discussion sub-tab) and will affect only the particular page. From the Slug block you can change the slug of the page. The slug is a part of the friendly URL of the page (e.g. hostknox-wordpress-hosting in yourdomain.com/hostknox-wordpress-hosting). Page slugs are used with pretty permalinks; for more information check out the tutorial on how to manage permalinks in WordPress. From the Author block you can change the author associated with the page.
For more details and screenshots read the tutorial on how to manage the settings on the add/edit page form in WordPress.