Custom post types in WordPress have truly changed the CMS game for WordPress. It gives an extra room for flexibility and features that enables you to do more with WordPress. Now, you can create and extend your website(s) to create specialized digital spaces for your visitors, customers, and users.
Let’s delve deeper into WordPress post types, templates, kinds, etc. Take a dive into WordPress and understand how it evolved WordPress to cater to much bigger and more diverse users and audiences.
Why do I Need a Custom Post Type (CPT)?
You must’ve read about post types and their needs in the previous article. Creating custom post types enables you to show different content on your website that go beyond the standard format like a post, page, etc.
For example, if you run a website that talks about different recipes, then you’d want to create a recipe post type. With custom post types there is no stopping you from creating any kind of website, whether it be personal or professional. As it will enable you to create custom post types for portfolios, research, services, movie reviews, testimonials, etc.
So, primarily It helps to better organize the content on your website. Also, makes it easier for you to update, edit, and add more content to different post types, thus maintaining content diversity on your website.
Custom post types can have different custom fields and their own custom category structure.
Many popular WordPress plugins use custom post types to store data on your WordPress website. The following are a few top plugins that use custom post types:
- WooCommerce adds a ‘
product’ post type to your online store. - Contact Form 7 creates a ‘
wpcf7_contact_form’ post type to store all your forms. - Product Notices for WooCommerce adds a ‘
product-notices-cpt’ custom post type.
Do I Need Custom Post Types?
Before venturing into a customized WordPress experience, the first task is to figure if your website actually needs a custom post type (s). Because believe me, the maximum results can be achieved with default or built-in post types that come with WordPress!
A custom post type is nothing more than a regular post with a different post_type value in the database. The post type of regular posts is post, pages use page, attachments use the attachment, and so on. Create your own to indicate the type of content created. You could create custom post types for books, industries, research, case studies, reviews, services, etc.
You can achieve the following:
- The custom post type will show up in the back end as a separate menu item with its own post list and “
add new” page - Navigating to
https://mysite.com/customposttype/will take you to the archive page for the post type. This is akin to visiting the front page for the latest posts from the “post” post type. - Categories and tags can be made available to the custom post type, or you can create custom taxonomies.
Apart from these, you also have the freedom to modify it as you like, right from its placement in the menu, which user level can access, whether it should be hierarchical or not, you can modify countless options, such as where the custom post type should be placed in the menu, should it be searchable, which user level can access it, should it be hierarchical, custom rewrite rules, etc.
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