WordPress Post and Pages – What is the difference?

In WordPress, you can write either posts or Pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts, in a default setup, appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page.

Pages are for content such as “About,” “Contact,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present timeless information about yourself or your site — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any content.

General

In general, Pages are very similar to Posts in that they both have Titles and Content and can use your WordPress Theme templates files to maintain a consistent look throughout your site. Pages, though, have several key distinctions that make them quite different from Posts.

What Pages Are:

• Pages are for content that is less time-dependent than Posts.
• Pages can be organized into pages and subpages.
• Pages can use different Page Templates which can include Template Files, Template Tags and other PHP code.

What Pages are Not:

• Pages are not Posts, nor are they excerpted from larger works of fiction. They do not cycle through your blog’s main page. WordPress Plugins are available to change the defaults if necessary.
• Pages cannot be associated with Categories and cannot be assigned Tags. The organizational structure for Pages comes only from their hierarchical interrelationships, and not from Tags or Categories.
• Pages are not files. They are stored in your database just like Posts are.
• Pages are not included in your site’s feed.

Changing the URL of Your Pages

To change the URL part (also referred to as “slug”) containing the name of your Page, use the “Edit” (or “Change Permalinks” in older WordPress versions) button under the Page title on the Edit screen of the particular Page, accessible from Pages tab of WordPress Administration Panel.

Creating a List of Pages

WordPress is able to automatically generate a list of Pages on your site within the sidebar or footer, for example, using a Template Tag called wp_list_pages(). See the wp_list_pages page for information on how to customize how WordPress displays the list of Pages on your site.

There are also WordPress Plugins that will help you display a list of Pages within in Posts and in other areas of your WordPress Theme.

Creating Your Own Page Templates

The files defining each Page Template are found in your Themes directory under /wp-content. To create a new Custom Page Template for a Page you must create a file using a plain text editor (e.g Notepad or TextWrangler). Let’s call our first Page Template snarfer.php.

At the top of the snarfer.php file, put the following:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Snarfer
*/?>

The above code is required and defines the snarfer.php file as the “Snarfer” Template. “Snarfer” may be replaced with most any text to change the name of the Page Template. The Template Name will appear in the WordPress Theme Editor for editing. For more information on Theme naming conventions see reserved Theme filenames for file names you should not use.