Why and How To Use Custom Post Types in WordPress
WordPress websites are great at storing content. If you have vast amounts of images and words to go with them, WordPress can be a great resource for showcasing your content. By default it only has two post types, Pages and Posts. People may also have many other types of content they’d like to show, such as project documentation, client testimonials, project listings and many more. Standard Post and Pages can be used to house all this content, but there’s a great alternative in WordPress, these are Custom Post Types!
Custom Post Types – or CPTs, allow you to get a similar user interface to Posts and Pages, but allow you to signify any type of content you may need. It doesn’t matter what you may want to create a CPT for, or what content you want in that section, there are limitless options. We will explain and show what is capable with Custom Post Types below:
Why You Should Create Custom Post Types
The reason for using CPTs is because during the build process of a website, you may be constrained with just having default Pages and Posts. In various scenarios, you may want to create a completely different section due to the nature of the content. “Forms” is a regularly-used post type. Using the traditional sections don’t tend to fit-well with specified content.
Another scenario may be that you want to display specific types of courses on a website. This may be split up into “Maths Courses”, ”Science Courses” and “IT Courses”. These specific sections don’t tend to associate with standard Posts or Pages, so a CPT would work well in this instance. With each section getting its own fields for data to be entered into. By doing this, you’d tailor each CPT to their own type of course, as you wouldn’t see the “equations” field inside the “English Courses” section, nor would you see the “Grammar” field inside the “Science Courses” post type.
USING A PLUGIN THAT ALREADY CREATES CPTs
Plugins can create their own CPTs, which may be unknown to users of WordPress. A good example of this is the e-commerce plug-in WooCommerce. This particular platform tends to use the “Products” section to house all the products that a seller may want in their shop. This section in itself is a Custom Post Type. It would make little sense to have these “Products” CPTs displayed as standard “Posts” or “Pages”, so WordPress can be adapted and added-to in order to give custom sections which make no sense to add anywhere else.
Custom Post Types Help WordPress Improve Your Site
Custom Post Types are a very important and powerful feature that allows you to adapt and mold WordPress into anything you may want it to be. This in itself can allow you to turn this once-simple blogging platform into a diverse and powerful Content Management System for your website. This allows you to create custom sections and areas that may not fit into the standard WordPress hierarchy, instead it enables Manchester website designers to create a variety of very-different types of websites for clients overall. The overall power and customization of WordPress is truly limitless!
