There are tons of ways you can modify WordPress to meet your own needs. One of these ways is to add in custom post types. What are they and when would you need to do this? These are just a couple of the topics we hope to help you with in our article today.
What is a Post Type?
By default, WordPress comes with a handful of post types. They include: post, page, attachment, revision and nav menu. WordPress gives you the chance though to create your own post type and name it whatever you want. As you can see, right out of the box – pages and posts are two of the main category types you have to post. What if you wanted to wanted a different way to display your content? This is where a custom post type would come into play.
When Should I Use Custom Post Types?
There is no rules for how a post type should look. For example, if you were running a video game WordPress-powered blog, you might want several post types. You could set up custom post types for things like reviews. You could also have the game reviews sorted in new ways, like by publisher or genre. This way reviews could be displayed in a different fashion than regular posts. It will also make it easier for users to browse one section of the website without having to jump to other things – like your regular blog posts.
If you are a graphic designer, you could create a custom post type for your art work. The art work might get lost if you just include it as a regular blog post. By creating a custom post type for it, a user could browse through all your graphic art in the same location.
The best way to think of custom post types are advanced ways of displaying unique content on your WordPress-powered blog.
Do you need to add custom post types? It really depends on what you need from WordPress as a publishing platform. There are many websites that do not need anything more than the post types that WordPress comes with. However, there are a lot of websites that take advantage of this advanced way of tweaking your content. This is just one more way that WordPress is much more of a content management system and not just your ever day blog script.