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I mentioned in an earlier article, how each page you can visit on a website will not necessarily have its own file on the web server. In the case of a CMS, often times the same file will get reused for multiple web-pages. Understanding that is going to be very important if you decide to create your own theme for WordPress. What if you’re new to WordPress though, and just want to understand the very basics?
If that’s the case for you, then you’ll probably want some clarification on certain potentially confusing aspects of WordPress. One thing I remember thinking was particularly confusing about WordPress when I was just getting started was how to differentiate between a ‘post’ and a ‘page’. I didn’t understand why it made a difference which heading I labeled my content under. After all, I had already taken a look under-the-hood, and realized that both of them come from the same underlying table.
Now, having worked with WordPress for quite some time, I have a much better understanding of the subtle differences between the two. I’ll typically use a ‘page’ when I want to create content that is only going to be used once. I’ll use a ‘post’ when I’ll be creating recurring content such as blog posts.
Pages can be easily added to WordPress’ menu system, whereas individual posts cannot be (unless you hard-code the absolute path to one). WordPress 3′s ingenious menuing system does allow you to quite simply add a link to a category of posts however.
Once you get into the editing for these items, you’ll also notice that posts will allow you to specify tags and even a category that can help define it, whereas pages will not. When you’re editing a page, you might notice (depending on what theme you’re using) that you have the option to specify what template your page is going to adopt. Different page templates can drastically change how the content on the page is going to appear. For instance, you might have one page template that has a sidebar, and one that does not. Up until recently posts didn’t have anything comparable. Just last week however, WordPress 3.1 was released, and one of the new features that it provides is opening doors for themes to support “Post Formats“. Post formats are similar in that they can change how the content is going to be presented but there are some very distinct differences. Neither themes, nor plugins can create new types of post formats. Themes are allowed to support pre-defined types of post formats however, and they are pretty much all-encompassing.
In short, choosing between using a page or a post for the content that you’re about to publish really boils down to how you want to use that content.
