Transcript
Introduction
Good day, and welcome back to your Learn WordPress journey. In this section, we’re going to dive into a fundamental aspect of WordPress, understanding the difference between 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.
Practical
Go to WordPress Playground and complete the following activities to test your knowledge. Click on ‘Activate Live Preview’ to get started:
- Create a Post: Navigate to the Posts section in the WordPress dashboard and click on “Add New Post.” Create a new post with a title and dummy content about a frog. Download a photo of a frog from https://unsplash.com/s/photos/frog?license=free and add the image as the post featured image.
- Dummy content you can use: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Qui doloremque provident est molestiae harum eum distinctio maxime hic omnis iste qui asperiores facere sit nesciunt voluptatem est tempore enim! Ea sapiente internos ad impedit sunt ad omnis rerum ut quia internos quo galisum blanditiis aut porro officiis.”
- Apply Categories and Tags: Create a Category called ‘Animals’ and a tag named ‘Amphibians’ and apply the category and tag to the post.
- Publish a Page: Navigate to the Pages section in the WordPress dashboard and click on “Add New Page.” Create an About page, add dummy content, and then publish.
- Navigation Menu Integration: Navigate to the Site Editor and observe how the page you created automatically integrates into the website’s navigation menu.
- Edit a Page in the Site Editor: Select an existing page or create a new one within the Site Editor interface. Add dummy content to the Content block.