WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Working with Custom Post Types

A new feature in WordPress (new as of version 3.0) is a feature called custom post types. This feature allows you, the site owner, to create different content types for your WordPress site that give you more creative control over how different types of content are entered, published, and displayed on your WordPress Web site.

Personally, we wish WordPress had called this feature custom content types so that people didn't incorrectly think that custom post types pertain to posts only. Custom post types aren't really the posts that you know as blog posts. Custom post types are a different way of managing content on your blog, by defining what type of content it is, how it is displayed on your site, and how it operates — but they're not necessarily posts.

By default, WordPress already has different post types built into the software, ready for you to use. These default post types include

• Blog posts
• Pages
• Navigation menus (see Book VI)
• Attachments
• Revisions

Custom post types give you the ability to create new and useful types of content on your Web site, including a smart and easy way to publish those content types to your site.

You really have endless possibilities for how to use custom post types, but here are a few ideas that can kick-start your imagination (they're some of the most popular and useful ideas that others have implemented on their sites): ...