The awesome new post_type in Wordpress 3.0
February 15th
Daniel Pataki
Wordpress
post types, Wordpress 3.0
2 comments already, the latest by Nicki Minaj, why not join the discussion?
Wordpress 3.0 is about 2 months away, and we will see the addition of the single feature that kept Wordpress from being a full blown CMS, post types! This comes in handy when you’re building a blog with a few different sections, for example a personal blog, with a section about movies you’ve seen.
You could separate the posts using categories, it would work, but it wouldn’t be the best way to do things. Also, a normal post isn’t necessarily the best medium through which to convey a movie you’ve seen. With Wordpress 3.0 you can create different post types, meaning that below the “Posts” menu in your backend, you will also see a “Movies” menu if you’ve created the post type. You can enable comments, categories, tags and so on for these, and what makes it even more powerful is the custom taxonomy you can bind to them.
For example, when writing your personal posts you may have categories like “Daily awesomeness”, “Food”, “School”, “Work”, and so on. Movies on the other hand require a different set of categories, and if you would also like to catalog recipes you’ve cooked, you would again need a different set of categories. You could of course just keep all of them in the categories box, but with Wordpress 3.0 (actually this is also available in the current version), you can create new taxonomy types.
In the above case, you could have “Personal Categories”, “Movie Categories”, “Recipe Types”. These would all act in the same way as your usual category box, but only categories belonging to that taxonomy will be seen.
The extent of how awesome this is may not be that apparent if you’re not a developer, since the above blog could be accomplished with other methods, but the new platform offers extremely good options, and much more logical ones too, no hacking. In addition, the features I mentioned mean that you can now use Wordpress to manage any type of content more easily. Create a catalog, use it as a business card database, use it as a calendar, so on and so forth. I think we will be seeing a lot of websites spring up running Wordpress which are not blogs, and hooray for that since the new 3.0 Wordpress is truly awesome.
