#2: WordPress Posts and Pages

Learning Outcomes

Here are the learning outcomes for this lesson. We will learn to differentiate between posts and pages, create a post and page, apply categories and tags to posts, and create and edit a page in the Site Editor.

Overview

Before we jump into the specifics, let’s start with an overview. Both posts and pages in WordPress are content types, but they serve different purposes. In short, posts are used for dynamic content, such as blog posts, news articles, recipes, etc. In contrast, pages are static type content, like a contact page, for example.

Posts

Here we are in the WordPress Dashboard. To create a new post or page, you can navigate to the posts or pages section on the left-hand menu. And if you want to create a new post or page, merely click on Add New Post or Add New Page. Let’s start with posts. Posts are for dynamic, regularly updated content entries that are displayed in reverse chronological order. They are perfect for regularly updated content, such as blog articles, news pages, or even reviews. Imagine you have a cooking blog and want to share your latest recipe. You would create a new post for this content. As you can see in this example, I have already created two different posts and added categories and tags.

Categories and tags

Categories and tags are essential for posts. Categories are like the table of contents for your blog, grouping similar posts together. Tags, on the other hand, are more specific keywords that describe the content in greater detail. So for my food blog, I’ve created two categories already, Mains and Breakfast, and the tags describe more about the recipe. So, let’s go ahead and create a new post. A Chocolate Cake Recipe. But please note, I’ve already created a category named Dessert and two tags, namely Cakes and Cupcakes and Chocolate. So now we’ll go ahead to all posts and then click on Add New Post.

Firstly, I will add the title of the blog post and then the recipe. Once I’ve added the recipe, I will open up the sidebar settings and scroll down to categories and tags. Then, I will select the Dessert category and add the Chocolate and Caking Cupcakes tags. Next, I will also add the post-featured image or the post thumbnail and select an image from my media library. Next, we can decide to save this as a draft, or if we scroll up in our sidebar settings, we can click on the date next to publish and then decide to publish this now, or schedule it to go live at a later stage. I will go ahead and publish this now, and then we can see what our posts look like on the front end. Here, we can see our three recipes on our blog page and open up one of our individual recipes to see the result.

Pages

Now, let’s talk about pages. Pages are static, timeless content that doesn’t change frequently. Examples include your site’s Home page, a Services page, an About page, and a Contact page. If you want to create a dedicated About Us section for your website, you’d use a page. Unlike posts, pages don’t have categories or tags. They are standalone pieces of content, so let’s go ahead and add a new page, and call it “About”, and then add some content. Once published, we can view it on the front end, and you will also notice that the About page is now part of the navigation menu.

Did you know you can also create and edit pages in the Site Editor? So let’s make our way to the Editor, and this will take us to the Site Editor. Then, we can make our way to pages, and here, you can create a new page or you can edit an existing one. The great thing about the Site Editor is that you can seamlessly move between pages, styles, templates, patterns, etc. And there we have it.

Conclusion

Remember, posts are for dynamic, regularly updated content, while pages are for static, timeless information.