As part of my continuing series on the nuts and bolts of WordPress, I thought I’d give you a run down of the different content types you can have in WP that make it better than JUST a blogging platform.
Because of plugins, you are not just limited to two main types of content. Out of the box, wordpress has the ability to make two type of content, Pages and Posts.
Pages – These are static pages that you would have that would get updated, but are not essentially updated on a regular basis.
Posts – These make up your blog posts, and are usually the main crux of the site that you will be working with the most. By default, WordPress will handle a lot of this for you, in terms of formatting and more, but with some extra plugins you can add additional functionality to these as well.
Some other types of content, with the right plugins you can make are:
Galleries – Say you have a portfolio of work, or a client has some things that they want to showcase like houses that they remodel or a group of things that they want to show all at once. A gallery would be a great way to show this.
Lists – Say you had an employee directory on a site that you wanted to add to, and manage. Well, there’s numerous plugins that will let you do this. Not only this, but let you control the way the information’s displayed and more.
Events – Just a continuation of the whole ‘lists’ thing. Basically, anything can be a list item and then from that item, you can make a list of items. Think of it as a file folder. In a file folder you may have multiple pieces of information, name, places, dates, meeting notes, etc.
You can format those types of bits of information across multiple “file folders” so that the presentation is always the same. Here’s an example of making an Events lists, with the presentation layer on the right side, and the backend stuff on the left.
Contact Forms - Want to have a form on your site for getting in touch with you about freelance or a potential sale? There’s a plugin for that as well to take the guesswork out of building something like that from scratch.
Shopping Carts – More and more business is being done online. If you can add a shopping cart fairly easily to your site, shouldn’t you? WP makes it easy to do this. This alone may be a post in the future. Right now, I don’t know that much about this, but I’m reading up on it and will probably implement something myself on this site for things I’ve created.
There’s a ton more, but you get the idea. WordPress will give you the ability to make a lot of different kinds of things outside of just static pages, with a variety of plugins to choose from. With WordPress being open source, it is under the GPL license, which means that there’s a lot of WordPress functionality that you can bake into your site, FOR FREE! Did I mention WordPress itself is FREE?
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about plugins some more, and give you some examples of ones that power this site. I’ll also go over how WP’s new plugin install directory makes it incredibly painless to try and install new plugins. If you are enjoying this series or have something specific you want me to cover, please drop me a comment in the comments below.
