Last month saw the 15th birthday of WordPress and since its launch on the market, the CMS has evolved a lot and has introduced several features and functionalities. Whenever we talk about WordPress, the first thing that comes to mind is that of a great blogging platform. But over the years, this concept has slowly changed and WordPress now supports responsive layouts and e-commerce solutions as well. By default, WordPress presents posts and pages as its main content system. But users can easily create many types of custom content as needed.
Did you know that custom post types can help you segment your content within WordPress?
As stated above, WordPress development comes with a handful of content types by default. Posts and pages are the most used and are the ones that categorize and separate the content within WordPress. Content can be segmented into different areas of the WordPress admin panel and offer unique data sets by data type. This data can then be used on custom screens for users when the website is activated. Custom post types extend simple WordPress posts and pages and allow users to create content types that scale with specific and unique templates to present data to website visitors.
When and why should you use custom post types?
Depending on the type of content that you are willing to publish on your WordPress website, you can develop them. A new type of custom post can be a great idea if you have plans to start publishing something that needs to be kept separate from any other posts and pages. For example, having a separate section for your books on your WordPress review website will make the content easily understandable to your audience and will also distinguish the reviews from the rest of your web content. In fact, this will also help you to set certain specific parameters for each of your books and then display them along with the review.
Check out some popular plugins out of the box to create CPT
Difficulty creating your own custom CPT plugins? There is nothing to worry about as there are some very good plugins out of the box for creating custom post types. Have a look:
Easy content types: This plugin provides an extremely easy to use interface for them, meta boxes and taxonomies. It’s a feature-rich plugin and the dashboard explains what they are and how you can work with them. Each module is well documented with each field labeled and explained.
Custom post type user interface: This plugin is easy to use and allows you to create new types of posts, the corresponding taxonomies and also edit the ones that already exist on your site. Another important thing you can do with this plugin is that you can import a custom post that you have on any other site.
Types of tool sets: This plugin allows you to customize the WordPress admin by adding the content types, custom fields, and taxonomies. It helps you manage them, and all of this can be done through the WordPress admin panel.
Types: This is a popular free plugin that allows you to create custom post types, fields, and taxonomies. This plugin stands out from the rest due to its developer-friendly and easy-to-use interface. If you know the encoding you can use the PHP API or else you can use the simple GUI. It also handles custom fields well, which you can add to posts, pages, and also users.
Pods: The plugin is very simple compared to any other on the list. But it offers you the functionality that you might need in most cases. The two main sections of the plugin are Post Types and Taxonomies. To use this plugin, you don’t need any coding skills as everything is there through a handy interface.
