WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

39

Customizing WordPress

The goal of this book was to get you up and running with WordPress and show you the basics of using the software to create content for your site. I also introduced you to the possibilities of extending the functionality of WordPress through plugins. Now, I want to say a little about four important ways you can have your WordPress theme customized to make your site even more powerful and easier to use:

• Custom templates: Whether they're page templates, category templates, single post templates, and so on, you can add as many new theme templates as you want to help present your content in different ways.
• Custom fields: These additional fields for posts, pages, or any type of content can serve many purposes, but the basic idea is to give you more control over individual pieces of content and make it even easier to enter that content.
• Custom post types: Best to think of these as new types of content, different from posts or pages in WordPress. The ability to create and use these types has been a major breakthrough in making WordPress a true content management system.
• Custom taxonomies: Like the categories you use for organizing posts, you can create additional ways of classifying your content — each accessible separately from any other taxonomy. Again, this recent development in WordPress has made the system even more flexible.

Learning how to use these features is well beyond the scope of this book, but I think it's important to understand what they can do ...