# When creating posts, there is some really basic html stuff that I want to do but can’t in WordPress. Should I be using some other editor and then entering into WP once it’s all set? (If so, suggestions?)
You can click on the HTML tab in the editor to insert HTML. However, be aware even in HTML mode, WordPress still retains some annoying filtering of some HTML. There are plugins to correct this, but the easiest thing to do is simply turn off the Visual Editor (haven’t used 2.7 yet, but the option for this in 2.6 was USERS > YOUR PROFILE > remove checkmark from “Use Visual Editor” and SAVE.) If the Visual Editor is turned-off, I *believe* WP no longer filters your HTML at all.
# I want to put a bunch of posts onto a specific page but cannot figure out how to do it. I created a page in WP but cannot get individual posts to appear there (there’s no option to post to a specified page). To be real specific, I have a number of draft posts that contain video clips and I want to post them to a page I called ‘Video Series’.
WordPress has “posts” or “pages”. “Posts” (dated entries) appear on your blog page by default. “Pages” are separate top-level items from the blog — they can be edited, but you can’t put “posts” in them, at least not without specific templates to do that. (From the sound of your post above, this is an advanced topic, and you should master the basics of using WordPress before delving into templates.)
Re: your video posts… the easier way to do this would be to create a category called “Video Series” and categorize all the video posts accordingly (by the way, you can use more than one category for any post). The default way WordPress works is to have a main blog page that displays your most recent entries, and allows the visitor to page through them. But you also usually have a list of categories in the sidebar, so that the visitor can click a given category and see only posts in that category.
What you are trying to do (have a separate page for certain kinds of posts) is not default WordPress behavior and requires creating new templates. This can be done — and it isn’t brain surgery, although the learning curve is dependent on how familiar you are with editing files and uploading them with FTP — but it sounds to me like you are still getting accustomed to the basic way that WP works, so it would be best to master that first.
# Tags: What are they used for? Is this keywords for the post?
Yes, basically they are keywords. There are categories and tags in WordPress since version 2.3. There is some redundancy between the concepts, but basically categories are big main topics, large buckets to categorize your posts. Tags are on-the-fly keywords.
# Permalinks: From reading, it seems as though everyone would/should want permalinks because it will be easier for search engines to pick up your posts. If that’s the case, why is it an option rather than a default? Under what circumstances would you not want to use permalinks?
To be honest, I’m not sure. Perhaps someone else can answer that question.
My post above is another example of basic stuff that I cannot get a handle on… when typing the post, I clicked the ‘li’ button before and the ‘/li’ button after each topic – thinking that it would create a list of the topics but it didn’t do it.
Actually, if you view source of the page, it did put in your list tags. But you didn’t wrap the list in <ul></ul> or <ol></ol> tags, so that’s probably why it didn’t show them as a list.
Have you looked at the Getting Started with WordPress section in the Codex? From your post, it sounds like you might benefit from going through that section carefully. If you find the Codex overwhelming or confusing, you can also Google for basic WordPress tutorials — there are many good ones, although I don’t have any links handy to offer you.
