Brief Introduction to Custom Post Types

Note: This intro is going to be using words “post” and “posts” to explain topic at hand. Which is going to cause readers confuse the said words with “blog post”. So unless I say explicitly blog post, don’t think I am referring to blog post. I will try my best to keep things clear.

The notion that WordPress is a blogging platform has long been proven wrong with the advent of many features like Custom Post Types, Custom Taxonomies, menus, plugins, etc. WordPress is a content management system, which makes it capable of handling different types of content. One such type of content is post, which is also a blog post type. With Custom Post Types, you can build other types of content and present them accordingly their “type”.

Custom Post Types is a feature, which was introduced in WordPress 3.0. For example, many themes come with post type “portfolio” which is supposed showcase work samples. Other themes come with “projects” post type and so on. Although all post types’ content is stored within wp_posts database table, but is differentiated by post_type column. By default, WordPress comes packaged with following post types:

Custom post types feature gives you the ability to create certain types of content and you can name them however you want. But.. why would you want have/build custom post type? How can you fully benefit from this capability? Well, you will want to build custom post type if you write regional news? Sure, news can be published via default ‘post’ post type and this is certainly the way it is mostly done, but why the hell would someone’s standard posts be different from their news’ entries? The said post type(regional news) may then be customized accordingly its content type, right?

There are many uses of custom post types. Just to give you a few ideas where CPT may be useful:

So many ways, right? There are so many wildly creative uses of CPT that I’m afraid if I sit here to compile an extensive list, years will go by, but I still won’t have the right to call it extensive. Custom Post Types give you more control over how different types of content is presented in your blog. WordPress started as a blogging platform, but evolved into a competent content management system.