WordPress has two types of content..
- Posts
- Pages
What makes them different?
Pages can have “parents” and “children”.
- Parent Page
- Child Page
- Grand Child Page
- Uh.. Great-Grand Child Page?
- Grand Child Page
- Child Page
Posts can be grouped into Categories and labeled with Tags.
What’s the difference between a Category and a Tag?
Almost the same thing.
Categories can have parents and children.
Tags can’t.
In WordPress lingo, Posts and Pages are called “post types”.
Categories and Tags are called “taxonomies”.
One of the things I love about WordPress is that you can customize EVERYTHING.
If you ever wanted to bust out of the Posts or Pages box and have your own post type you could make that happen with a “custom post type”.
The same with Categories and Tags.
You could make your own “custom taxonomy”.
The way you do this with WordPress is usually by writing code and putting that into your theme’s “functions.php” file or by creating a custom plugin.
The functions you would need to make this happen would be the register_post_type() function for creating a custom post type and the register_taxonomy() function for a custom taxonomy.
If you wanted to take a shortcut and have the code generated for you then check out the GenerateWP site.
They have a page that can generate custom post types and another one that can generate custom taxonomies.
This is what I used before I discovered an amazing plugin that now does all of the hard work for me.
It’s called Toolset.
With this plugin all I have to do now is just fill in a few boxes and press a button to generate my own post types and taxonomies.
I recently used Toolset to help me create the Waco Sculpture Zoo site where we had to make custom post types not only for the sculptures, but also for the artists and donors that were involved with each sculpture.
I was also able to use Toolset to create a map that would let people see exactly where each sculpture was along the path.
There are a few alternatives to Toolset, but this is usually the first plugin I go to when needing a custom way to organize the content in a website.