I had a little argument with someone last week. WordPress is, they said, a pile of rubbish. They'd spent an hour typing up a post and WP refused to publish it! Or rather, it said it had published it, but it refused to show up on the front page except as a link in the sidebar. That sidebar link was the easy clue: what they'd written was a page, not a post. And their response, quite rightly, was "huh?"

"Posts" versus "pages" is one of those places where WordPress' jargon serves to obscure rather than illuminate. Most of the time when you're blogging, you'll want to write a post. Posts are the pieces that show up automatically on your front page and in your category and date archives. If your theme has navigation for "next" and "previous", those are posts it's looking at.

Pages are not part of any of that. They're separate from the chronological flow of your blog. In a typical WordPress set up, they don't appear on the front page; they're not in RSS feeds; they're not in categories. (Pages are now included in search results, though they didn't used to be.)

When to use Pages

Pages should therefore be used when you have content that should not be part of the chronological run of posts. Most obviously, this would include items like "about me" and "contact me" pages. If the blog carries advertising, rates and availability might be shown on a page. A comments policy might go on a page. Anything that's about the blog itself rather than content for that blog should probably live on a page.

When not to use Pages

Pages shouldn't be used to highlight popular or premium content. Page content - because it's removed from the front page, from archive pages and from RSS feeds - is typically less visible than normal post content, so using pages to surface post content makes no sense.

If posts need to be highlighted by - for example - keeping them at the top of the front page or highlighted in the theme in some other way, it's better to use either a featured category that allows selected posts to disrupt the chronology: I did this for Dan's blog (featured post at the top) and also on TameBay (featured post on the left). Alternatively, sticky posts will keep one post at the top even when subsequent posts are made, and recent, popular and/or related posts could all be listed in sidebars.

Changing posts into pages

So what do you do if all your content is pages when it should be posts? There's no way through the WP admin section to change pages into posts, or vice versa. There are two ways to change the format:

• cut and paste from the pages into "add new post" and delete the pages when you're done, or
• if you're happy to edit your database directly (through PHPMyAdmin, for example), in the wp_posts table, change post_type from page to post for the appropriate entries.

A note about using WordPress as a CMS

Though blogging is the main purpose of WordPress, it's not the only thing it gets used for: it has built entire, static websites with it with ne'er a blog post in site. In which case, an hierarchically-arranged set of pages might be just the thing: but if that is the case, you'll be using a theme that's appropriate for that set-up, rather than a blog theme which won't quite work for what you're doing.

Tags: Blogging, pages, posts, themes, WordPress

Posted by Sue on May 3, 2009 in WordPress.