Last Updated on March 3, 2023
A lot of premium themes in WordPress advertise their support for custom post types. Custom post types first became available in WordPress 3.0. Any premium WordPress 3.0+ theme should support them, because they are incredibly useful. Custom post types give you control over more than just your posts. In many premium themes, they are actually used in ways that make the process of managing your entire site much easier.
The Idea
WordPress is becoming more and more popular as a content management system. Where content management systems are concerned, the best ones function exactly as the name implies. Custom post types are merely a very clever and very flexible way of managing content. You can use them to keep things consistent throughout your site and to make it easier for visitors to navigate your content.
The default post types included in WordPress include attachments, revisions, blog posts, pages and others. Adding your own post type allows you to tag content as belonging to that type of content and, further, to apply particular formatting rules and display parameters to that content simply by attaching the post type label.
Using Post Types
The easiest examples of how post types can be used effectively involve complex sites, though they can also be used on very simple sites, as you’ll see shortly. Imagine a site that has an extensive catalog of products available for sale. By creating a specific post type for the products, you can ensure that they are all formatted in the same way and that they all display in the same way. This is a rather simple idea that translates to an incredibly powerful content management tool.
Likewise, you could create a custom post type for blog entries that are specific to giving technical information about the products for sale. You might call them “tech”, for instance.
On premium themes, there are oftentimes predefined custom post types that are integrated with the features included on the theme. For instance, there may be a particular post type for content that you want to include in an image slider. There may also be a custom post type that’s dedicated to photo gallery content. There are a lot of different ways that you can use this tool to organize your site better and to offer a much more interesting and intelligible experience to your visitors.
Theme Options
Most premium WordPress themes will include a menu that you can use to create and work with custom post types in the theme options panel. You can create them on your own using the default WordPress dashboard from the Editor menu. This process involves altering the PHP file directly, which is generally inadvisable unless you have experience working with source code and a good working knowledge of PHP itself.
If you purchase a premium WordPress theme, utilizing the custom post types function can help you organize a very large site in a very sensible way. Because it is such a powerful tool, it’s a good idea to sit down and figure out which categories you want to create for custom post types.
If you’re using a premium WordPress theme, be sure you check to see if the custom post types available can make it easier for you to handle multimedia. Oftentimes, they will automatically format your post so that it can accommodate whatever type of media applies in a very professionally displayed and intelligent way. WordPress is full of powerful features but, among all of them, this very simple ability to create a custom type for each of your posts is one of the most powerful for site organization and for your user experience.
Check out our previous articles:
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- 13 Complete WordPress Theme Management Plugins
- Top 10 Useful Translation Plugins for WordPress
- 40 Premium Responsive Portfolio WordPress Themes
- 15 Best Responsive Premium WordPress Themes
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