Pages
People sometimes have difficulty in understanding the difference between a Page and a Post. A WordPress Page is mainly used for static information such as About Me pages, Contact details etc.
Why? Because Pages don’t have the flexibility of Posts – you cant add categories or tags to them, and you cant manipulate how they are shown like you can with Posts.
Does this mean they are useless? Absolutely not! They simply do what they are good at, serving static information.
Plus they have something that Posts don’t, templates (see Page Attributes below).
All Pages
If you have been following this series on the WordPress Dashboard, then by now you will have realised that the “All Something” sections, such as All Posts and All Pages are pretty much the same.
Here you will find all the Pages that you have published, along side the author, date and number of comments.
You can also Edit and Quick Edit from this section too.
Add New
Virtually identical to the Add New Posts section.
Post Box
The big white box in the center which has an options bar at the top reminiscent of MS Word, and mostly they are text editing features, like bold and align etc.
Above the buttons is a small text link, Upload/Insert. this is where you can add media – images, videos,etc. Note that when you insert the media, it will go wherever the cursor is in the main text box.
On the right is two tabs, Visual and HTML. The visual is where you start, but if you want to customise any html directly in the individual post.
Manual Excerpts
It’s rare a page with be clipped into an excerpt, so this is mainly used for when you want a different excerpt than the standard first 55 words in your RSS feed.
Custom Fields
This is where you can add custom fields to your posts. These van be really useful and powerful. Basically you can add extra Meta data to your posts, i.e. in a post about reviewing the latest HD TVs you could add custom fields that say:
- Size: 40”
- Hertz: 60hz
- Price: $499
It of course depends on your theme as to whether they show up or not, so you would have to look into it. I know that a lot of Elegant Themes make use of custom fields really well.
Publish
Here you can publish the post, or set it as a draft or even schedule it to publish at a later date.
Featured Image
Some themes make great use of featured images, for example the InReview theme which uses them on the front page and the post page.
Adding one is the same system as putting an image into the post, but you click add as featured image rather than insert into post.
Page Attributes
This is where the power of pages comes into play. Firstly you have the Parent option, which allows you to have sub-pages, just like you can have sub-categories, another structural option for you.
The template section is where you can choose a template for each individual page which automatically alter the look of that page. These are either built into the theme or can be custom coded.
An example of this is with the Elegant Theme InReview, where it gives you template options for a login page, sitemap, contact, full width (no sidebar) and more and these either change the layout of the page/site or add functionality like a contact form.