“Custom Content Types”

For many, the standard web ‘page’ is all you need. “What we do”, “Who we are” ; perfect. But what if, let’s say, your organisation works in multiple countries, on multiple projects? These might be better presented via multiple page ‘views’. A ‘Location’ or ‘Project’ view. Filtered by ‘Year’ or ‘Partners’.

Custom content types allow you to ‘query’ virtually any property and present it as a page ‘view’ to the user.

What exactly are ‘custom content types’?

WordPress comes with two ‘content types’ by default – Pages and Posts. Pages are pretty obvious, but Posts include extra properties. Posts are essentially ‘blog posts’ or ‘articles’ and come with, for example, a ‘date published’ property. By default your posts will be ‘ordered’ by date published, and you can decide whether or not the date is displayed in your post.

WordPress allows you expand beyond these two default content types, and create custom versions, with unique properties.

Custom Content Type Example

Custom content types offer numerous possibilities and encompass hundreds of use cases, but for demonstration purposes it’s best to use, as an example, something we’re all familiar with – books.

You have a website that reviews and recommends books. People may come to your website with a ‘author’ in mind, or a ‘genre’ they like. Do you expect them to just trawl though every book article you’ve ever published, to find what they want? No. You have to classify some ‘properties’:

• Genre
• Author
• Year Published
• Publisher
• Recommendation Rating Score
• Most Recent Reviews …

You create a ‘Books’ custom content type with all those properties defined, and every time you write a new review, you include values for each.

Now when people visit your website they can sort, search and filter all the content based on those properties. Show me a list of all the ‘Historical Fiction’ books that have been reviewed? Which books by ‘Thomas Hardy’ have been reviewed?

This is part of a series of short articles highlighting why we choose WordPress as the web design and development platform for our clients.