Why you should be using custom posts and where.

This is part of a series of blogs describing exactly why, where and how to use custom posts in Word Press.

I have been doing a lot of work on this website: http://www.whichplm.com and although it looks pretty stable from the outside, I can tell you it is a right pain on the inside.

If you have a quick look at the PLM Suppliers section you can see a listing of suppliers in a nice table. The table is not important here but the suppliers pages (or microsite as we call them) are where these custom posts really come into their own.

For me custom posts solved a maintenance problem, I’ll try to describe briefly what that problem was: Microsites were normal posts, to create one you had to copy the design from a previous microsite, make sure it was in the right category, attach a news widget (using widget context plugin), create a contact form, attach the contact form widget, add a featured image and fill in some custom variables (used to generate the table).

As you can see the process is long, tedious and very easy to make mistakes. It also meant we had a whole list of widgets and contact forms and categories which just confused everything in a general sense.

So, how do we fix it?

Simple! Custom posts.

With custom posts you can:

  • Separate posts in the admin section
  • Separate categories so they mean more
  • Allow custom styling templates
  • Extra settings
  • Make custom variables invisible
  • Create your own interface for creating the posts
  • Attach widget areas easily
  • The list goes on…

So, in summary, if you have posts which you are having to style individually, or have variables associated with them or are in someway separate to normal posts you should be using custom posts.

You could even use these for dealing with different post types like video, images, galleries, longer posts etc. They don’t need to be specific things.

In my next blog I will start showing you how easy it is to create custom posts from scratch before moving on to some issues and advanced customisation (I say advanced but it’s really not that bad!)