A Guide to Managing WordPress Content
It might be difficult to figure out the best method to arrange and show your website’s information as it develops in volume and breadth. We’ll go through all of WordPress’ content management features in this article. If you’re a new(er) WordPress user, you might discover some cool features you didn’t know existed. Even if you’re a seasoned pro, you might find it useful to refer back to this article anytime you’re contemplating the many possibilities for your next content migration or new website.
While WordPress is a content management system (CMS), and the purpose of this piece is to teach you how to utilize content management tools to better curate your material, it’s crucial to understand the distinction between content management and content curation…
Content administration is a technical undertaking that WordPress’ built-in features and extensions make simple. That is, in fact, the subject of this article.
Content curation is more of an art than a science, and it’s done by an editor rather than a techie (not that the two are mutually exclusive). Curation is the process of utilizing the technological tools at your disposal to deliver content in the most effective manner feasible. Curation is the next generation of content management.
The value of curation should not be underestimated. I associate the phrase curation with terms like user experience, best practices, and bringing the cream to the top.
Content Management Tools in WordPress
I’ll go over the content management side of WordPress below, with a few curation recommendations thrown in for good measure, because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to curation.
The most important thing to know is that pressing the Publish button does not just change the status of text from private to public. It also entails categorizing it into one or more organizing boxes, whether basic or complex. The ideal way to organize and show your information is determined by your own imagination and preferences.
Let’s get this party started… While reading about content management solutions, consider content curation suggestions.
Types of Posts
Isn’t it true that a post is a post? That’s not the case. Almost anything in the WordPress database is technically a post. The posts are then divided into several sorts of posts. A WordPress Page, for example, is a WordPress post with the post type “page” assigned to it. Menus, media attachments, and, yes, posts are all built-in post types. As a result, postings with the type of post designated are commonly referred to as “blog posts.”
Custom post types (CPTs) can be generated as well. As a result, there are virtually no limits to the types of postings that can be created. A slider plugin may occasionally create its own post type. It’s very likely that a directory or classifieds plugin will develop its own post type.
Pages
Pages (posts of the “page” post type) are ideal for static content such as About Us, Contact, and Pricing pages. The term “static” does not imply that it will never change. Static content, on the other hand, is content that is “less time-dependent than Posts” (per the Codex).
The pages are arranged in a hierarchical order. They can, in other words, have child pages.
Pages can also be used to present a “best of” compilation of posts (i.e. blog posts), which works well when combined with Page Templates, another advantage of Pages over Posts.
Pages, child pages, and groupings of posts can all be thought of as manual or automatic Tables of Contents. It’s entirely up to you.
Page-list is my go-to plugin for easily showing multiple pages/posts on a single page. Super Post, on the other hand, appears to be a full-featured alternative.
WordPress Posts
WordPress Posts (posts of the “post” post type) are what WordPress was designed for in the first place: blogging.
The blog of a website is made up of its posts. This is a WordPress post, not a page, that you’re reading right now. It is written as of the date it was released and, because it is often time-dependent, it may lose value with time. It’s time-relevant or time-sensitive, to put it another way. For example, WordPress might add a new default post type in a year’s time, and this post would be slightly inaccurate/outdated if it didn’t mention it.
You’ll have to keep wishing if you’re like me and wish your material never went out of style and magically stayed updated. However, if you see it this way, you might not feel so awful about publishing and not updating:
Consider posts to be articles in a newspaper. Do you ever think to yourself, “Last February’s newspaper didn’t notify me about the weather forecast for March?” Grrr.” No, because you, the reader, are informed about the item’s predicted utility, which is usually only one day. Your posts are likely to be valuable for more than 24 hours, but time-dependence is one of the reasons.
Another approach to thinking about posts is as if they were a public journal. Yes, both personal and commercial blogs can be used to share your views, wishes, activities, and news. Just keep in mind that the majority of your posts will be short-lived. For example, after the event, your article about next week’s fundraising is mostly useless. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t have made the announcement on your blog, or that you should remove or unpublish it after the event. You can even do a follow-up article with images and accomplishments the following week.
Organizing Taxonomies / Posts
You’ll want to group comparable items together once you’ve determined which post kinds your WordPress site will utilize. For the Posts post type, WordPress includes Categories and Tags by default. Regardless of the post type to which they are applied, these organization techniques are known as Taxonomies.
Categories
Categories tend to be pre-defined and vast in scope” (Codex). If you write about social media, for example, you’ll want to include sections like Expanding Your Reach, Increasing Conversions, Security Tips, and Tools to Use.
Categories, like pages, are organized in a hierarchy. Under the parent category of Increasing Your Conversions, you may create a child category of Analytics. When someone hits your dynamic page example.com/category/increasing-your-conversions, content from the Analytics child category will also appear.
A post can now be assigned to many categories, which was previously impossible with WordPress. I bring this up to emphasize the fact that most posts should fall into one or two categories. What’s the sense of having ten categories if each post only fits into seven of them? When it comes to categories, most professional bloggers would agree that fewer is more.
Tags
Tags and categories are both taxonomies, thus they’re similar. They are, however, non-hierarchical. In other words, there are no parent and child tags in posts, and you can have as many as you like for your topic. Tags like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, for example, could be used on a social media website.
What method will you use to curate your content?
Don’t forget about content curation when planning your website’s content. It’s a crucial consideration when deciding how, when, and where your material will be available. Consider building resource pages, which are compilations of posts that have been manually created. They can boost your conversion rates, expand your subscriber list, and eventually boost your bottom line, disseminate your message, or help you reach whatever objectives you set.
Finally, as your content strategy becomes more targeted, complex, and professional, you may be asking how to keep track of everything from your WordPress Dashboard.
The easy answer is to simply download and install the Edit Flow plugin and get back to planning, scheduling, and publishing your useful material.