If there is one issue that consistently crops up with new clients who have WP sites, it’s defining which content is a Post and which is a Page. WP actually has a fairly decent guideline:

Pages are like posts except they live outside of the normal blog chronology and can be hierarchical. You can use pages to organize and manage any amount of content.

This, of course, makes perfect sense to the WordPress-initiated, but if someone is new to the concepts of blogging, cms, and site architecture, it just comes across as geeky hoohah. Allow me to break it down.

I’m going to use my latest project as an example. It’s a cms-driven site about an organization devoted to Salem’s downtown business scene and includes a community calendar, a blog about Salem business events and pages about the organization’s various committees and sponsored events. Fortunately, Salem has an incredibly dynamic business community and there seems to be something going on almost every day of the week. It’s a perfect example of what WordPress was meant for; a site that contains easy-to-update news about ongoing happenings as well as tons of information about Salem and the local business scene.

So what to put where? I guess it’s basically a question of which content is going to be useful at any point in time to the user and which content is time-sensitive. Say there’s going to be a fashion/home furnishings show at a local cafe. It’s something that will take place one night and you want people to come to it in abundance. The solution is to create a Post that will describe the upcoming event and assign it tags and categories so that it will be more easily found by the site’s readers.

Once the Post is published, it becomes a part of the “blog” portion of the site, that is, the page where readers can find the latest news posted about the site’s subject. A Post can be accessed in a variety of different ways. If it’s relatively fresh, it can be found in the posts contained on the blog portion of the site. If it’s been assigned tags (another name for keywords that describe the content of the Post) then if a reader clicks on a tag a Post has been given, say “benefits”, all other Posts with the same tag will be called up. If a reader clicks on a Category that Post has been assigned to, the Post will appear in that listing. The same goes for the chronological Archives function. All in all, a handy way for your readers to find and track all the events going on in your busy town.

So what about Pages? The way I try and explain this to people is that Pages are more like the traditional web site pages one is used to seeing. Rather than the more ephemeral information contained in the blog (Posts) section of the site, Pages are mainly a way to organize permanent information that you want your readers to always be able to easily see. For example, you want people to be able to easily find out what your site is about, so WordPress even includes an “About” page in the initial site set-up. Other things you might want people to easily find are a way to get in touch with you via a “Contact Us” page or, in the case of the Salem site, ways for new businesses to find out how the organization can be of use to them.

So how does one organize Pages? They don’t exist in a chronological archive and they aren’t organized via Categories or Tags, so what to do? Pages are organized into a family structure instead. Main sections of content, such as “About Us” are the Parent Pages and then those Parents can have Children. It’s all controlled via the Options panel underneath the edit window in your Write > Page section of the Dashboard.

Is there a way to control how Pages display on a site? I’ve actually used a number of techniques to solve this. The first isn’t really a technique, it’s just letting the Pages fall into their place in the header.php, or the sidebar.php files or maybe both. That depends on the Theme you have chosen. It’s also possible to order the pages in the Options section where it says Page Order. If you do this, then you have to number all the Pages, or it won’t work.

And if you’ve chosen a Theme for its groovy layout or colors and then discover that the Pages don’t display as you would like, don’t despair. It’s fairly easy to control with a little HTML and CSS. I’ve done this on the Salem Main Streets site by taking out the list_pages template tag in the header and replacing it with a CSS-styled unordered list of links to the Parent Pages. Then, since all the Pages were listed in the sidebar still, I simply added the title Site Map to that template tag. So at least all the pages are still visible in their hierarchy without crowding the header. (If I was more of a geek, and had more time, I’m sure I could come up with a conditional tag that displays only a certain level in the hierarchy, but things have been hectic around here!)