Posts are to Pages as Apples are to Oranges

One of the biggest sources of confusion to new WordPress bloggers is the difference between Posts and Pages. They look similar on the front end, their Editor page looks the same on the back end, they both start with a “P” – what’s the difference?

In six words, Pages are static, Posts are social.

Pages

Pages are like old-time HTML sites used to be. They sit there and they tell you stuff. The most prevalent Pages are About, Contact, and Home. Pages only change when they are updated and they stay that way until the next time. They have no dates, no categories, and no tags. Pages are, in a way, self categorizing.

One cool feature about Pages is how they also be arranged in a hierarchal structure as Parent and Child, where one page leads into another. For example, Events>2012 Events could be a Parent/Child structure.

Posts

Posts, on the other hand, are a lot more fun. Post are what makes a blog the social site it is.

Posts are fresh web pages published in reverse chronological order. Their numbers are legion, and they sit in a neat row awaiting your perusal.

Posts are driven by Categories and Tags, which allow you to corral them into index pages via Custom Menus. For instance, in my wine blog, I categorize posts by wine regions and have arranged navigation menu tabs for each region. So when a reader pulls down California, all my posts on California appear on an index page.

Posts can also be syndicated via RSS feeds and subscribed to. Email alerts can be sent each time a new post is published.

With some tweaking of the site’s code, a Post can be made to look exactly like a web Page by eliminating the date, author name, comments, categories and tags. For my new eponymous site created in Zenon Pro – the front page of which opens on a slider above a row of posts – I used the posts as pages with sidebars, and deleted every other post-like element.

Posts and Pages

Both Posts and Pages allow comments as well as sharing buttons below the body text.

Both Posts and Pages can be scheduled for future publication, and have options for publication status and visibility.

A WordPress site can be all Posts or all Pages, or a combination of both. This is why so many major corporations and media outlets have adopted WordPress for their sites. They look and feel like a regular web site, but with more functionality and big time sociability.

If you have any questions about the difference between Posts and Pages, please shoot me a comment. I love clearing up this apples and oranges issue.

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