When you are trying to publish content using WordPress, you’ll come across three content types:
When it comes to terminology, we call them “post types”:
We will not discuss custom post types in this course, so let’s focus on “Post” and “Page” post types.
Posts and Pages have two different purposes; you can’t interchange their purpose.
So, it is important to understand their purpose before posting content.
From a WordPress site standpoint, we use WordPress “Posts” to create and manage blog posts.
If you are not familiar with blogging at all, here is what I mean by blog posts:
Again, please remember that I am talking from a WordPress site perspective.
The “Pages” post type is used for creating static pages.
Pages like About Us, Contact Us, Terms & Conditions, etc., are the best examples of static pages.
We are calling them static pages because we don’t change the content of these pages that often.
Here are some real-world examples of static pages:
For example, the Homepage of the Basecamp website.
WordPress doesn’t ship with front-end user account management features. We usually rely on plugins for displaying these kinds of pages.
And these user account management plugins give us a shortcode to output the forms like Sign Up, Sign In, etc.
Therefore, we have to use a WordPress Page to put these shortcodes.
Don’t worry if you didn’t understand what I just said.
You’ll understand once we do this practically. And we will do this at a later point in the course.
Now here is the catch when it comes to Blog Roll pages.
When it comes to a WordPress website, if you want a Blog Roll page as the Homepage, you don’t have to create a WordPress Page for that because WordPress will automatically generate a Homepage for us.
But if you want the Blog Roll page as an internal page, then we have to create a WordPress page for that.
The best example of an internal Blog Roll page is the blog page of this website.
You get the idea, right?
Now let’s do some justification for this lesson’s title 😛
Here are some notable differences when it comes to WordPress Page vs Post.
A WordPress Post can have user comments so that users can share their views on blog posts. User comments are turned off for a WordPress Page by default.
A WordPress Post can be assigned a category like “Sports” or a tag like “Red Ball”. But a WordPress Page can not be assigned to a category or a tag.
Anyway, do we let people comment on pages like About Us? We don’t, right?
Also, what’s the use of assigning a category to a static page like About Us?
So, it became a standard to use a WordPress “Page” for static content that doesn’t need comments or categorization.
And a WordPress “Post” for articles related to blogging where the user comments and categorization helps the visitors.
Having said that, you are not restricted by any means.
Through some hacking, you can also enable categorization and user comments on a WordPress page.
At the end of the day, in my opinion, it also depends on how users interact with a piece of content on our website.
In the next lesson, we will learn how to create a blog post in WordPress.
