What is Custom Post Type in WordPress? WordPress comes with only a handful of built-in content types, and the most popular are posts and pages. These are useful enough in most cases, but you might want a few more to enhance your website’s functionalities and attract more visitors.
Enter Custom Post Types, which lets you define pages based on your need, specifications, and preferences.
A custom post type adds functionalities that you won’t see in a regular post or page content type. For example, a page showing a review or portfolio is considered a custom post type.
So, wondering what is a custom post type in WordPress, and how to create and manage one. Here’s a handy guide from Themissal. Let’s jump right in!
Create a custom post type
With custom post types, you can turn your WordPress website into a full-fledged Content Management Platform (CMS).
However, custom post types aren’t built-in to WordPress, so to create one, you’ll need plugins. You can try to create custom post with code, but it’s a bit complicated.
What you can do instead is find plugins that offer the functionalities you want. There are for e-commerce, marketing, forms, reviews, testimonials, and more! For a more in-depth guide to creating custom post types, check out our article.
Manage custom post types
After you’ve created your custom post type in WordPress, you’ll want to lay things out to maximize your investment in everything. From a user perspective, managing your custom post-type entries (or pages) works just like managing normal pages or posts. In other words, you’ll be able to find a section for custom post types among the other types of content you have on the site.
In the blog post shared above, we used Pods as our custom post-type plugin. This plugin has many features that allow us to change and add new content, check previews, as well as add custom taxonomies or categories to our custom post-type pages. Of course, these functionalities will differ from plugin to plugin, so choose one that is intuitive and easy to learn.
Display custom post types
In general, there are three ways you can display your custom post types on your WordPress website:
- Default archive template WordPress has its own default template to handle all types of content – normal pages, posts and even custom post types. It’s a “fallback template” of sorts, meaning WordPress will use it every time it can’t find a dedicated template for a given custom post type. What this means in practice is that you can view your custom post type as normal – like you would any other page – by simply navigating to that page’s address in your web browser.
- Custom templates: This step involves creating a file in your theme’s directory that will take care of displaying the content of a specific custom post type. WordPress will use that custom page instead of the default archive that we mentioned in the previous point. Here’s more information on how to create and customize templates in WordPress.
- Featured with other content on the front pagePost: This method is more technical, but allows you to display content from your custom post type on your home page with text, media, and elements.
Final thoughts
Understanding custom post types in WordPress is how you can diversify your site’s capabilities and turn it into a very useful CMS platform. To easily create custom post types, you’ll want to find the right plugin that can generate them the way you need them.
