Introduction
An author may post different kinds of content to their website including a blog, reviews, upcoming events, podcasts, tutorials, products and, of course, a complete catalog of all their books. Posting these different content types with the same format, layout and metadata creates a lot of manual work and leads to a disorganised site that’s difficult to maintain and hostile to visitors and search engines.
Luckily WordPress is a flexible, adaptive platform and allows us to create and use Custom Post Types to better organise and manage our different content types.
In this lesson I’ll explain what a Custom Post Type is and how they make our lives as authors easier.
What is a Custom Post Type?
In WordPress, a custom post type is a specific content type that you can create on the platform in addition to the default post type.
The default post type was designed for blogging and that’s all it should be used for. Custom post types allow us to create content layouts that are specific to our needs, providing more flexibility and control over how our content is structured and displayed.
In the use case for this course the author Dirk Volcano has created a “Books” custom post type to manage all his published book listings separately from his blog posts.
The Benefits of a Custom Post Type
- Organization: Helps organize different types of content separately. Blogs don’t get mixed up with Books making it easier to manage and for visitors to find.
- Customization: Custom Post Types tailor the WordPress admin interface and post content structure to fit specific needs. As you’ll see in detail in the next lesson a “Books” post is laid out very differently to a regular Blog Post.
Use Cases for Custom Post Types
We are going to go deep into setting up a ‘Books’ custom post type in this course. Although it’s outside the scope of this course a growing author website may choose to ADD other custom post types including…
- Portfolios for showcasing projects or work samples. For example the author may also be an artist who uses a PORTFOLIO custom post type to show off their artwork with a description and a form for new commissions.
- Products: With an established audience an author may move into direct sales selling books and merchandise. Adding WooCommerce, an ecommerce plugin, to WordPress automatically creates a “Products” custom post type.
- Events: Authors who frequently tour, attend panels, conventions or host workshops benefit from having an EVENTS custom post type as a dedicated area to keep fans informed and as a destination for promoting the event.
Summary
Custom post types are a powerful feature in WordPress that enable you to create a more customized and organized content management system tailored to your specific needs.
Call to Action
In the next lesson we’ll see what the BOOKS custom post type looks like in action on Dirk Volcano’s website.
