WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 10. Adding a New Page

Virtually everything covered so far about writing content applies to both posts and pages in WordPress. I've also covered the key functions unique to posts, such as categories and tags. Now, in this lesson, it's time to cover the functions unique to WordPress pages, such as using page templates or creating sub-pages.

Pages vs. Posts

In older versions of WordPress there was often only one word on the entire screen to visually tell you whether you were about to add a post or a page. In the most recent versions there are enough differences to easily avoid that confusion, as you can see from the tops of both screens shown in Figure 10-1.

Figure 10-1. Figure 10-1

The more common problem these days is a conceptual one: how exactly do posts and pages differ? A detailed discussion of this was covered in Lesson 1, but it's worth running over a couple of points again here.

If you're simply running a blog, the distinction is fairly clear: most of the content of your site is in the form of posts, with the newest ones displaying on the homepage, whereas pages are used occasionally for content that rarely changes. However, if you're using WordPress to run a website (assuming for a moment that it has no blog section), pages take on a more important role and posts are more isolated bits of information rather than all belonging to "a blog."

Organizational structure — categories ...