By the end of this video,
you'll know the primary differences between posts and pages. Let's get started.
There are three main differences between posts and pages and the first of them
is how they're displayed on your site.
I'm back in the editor for my About page and I'm going to click on the Publish
button now to add my page to the front end of my site.
You don't need to follow along with this step if you're not ready to publish
your About page too.
Once I click Publish WordPress double-checks that I'm ready and I can click
Publish once more to make the page live.
In the success notification that shows up,
I can click the View Page link to visit the page on the front end of the site.
Here you can see the page title and the content from the editor in the body of
the page. Like most WordPress themes,
Apex automatically adds the page into the menu, which you can see up here.
If I click on the site title,
you'll see the menu links stay present and I can click on "About" to return to
the About page.
Later in the course you'll create a completely custom menu so you can reorder
the menu items and make other changes, but the main point is...
Each time you publish a page, you should plan on adding it into your menu.
Otherwise there will be no way for visitors to find it.
I'll return to the admin dashboard and once it loads I'll click onto the Posts
menu. The Posts menu looks virtually identical to the Pages menu,
and here you can see one post titled,
"Hello World" that WordPress auto-publishes on brand new sites.
If you click on it,
you'll see that you're in the same editor that you use to make your About page,
and there's just one sentence of copy in the body of the post.
If you click on the View Post link, you'll see how it looks on the front-end.
Next,
I'll click on the site title to return to the homepage again and you'll see that
the "Hello World" post is already listed here.
Every post you publish is automatically added to the homepage in reverse
chronological order, meaning they're listed from newest to oldest.
So to summarize,
the first difference between posts and pages is that posts are always listed on
the homepage,
but pages aren't linked to anywhere on your site unless you add them to your
menu. By the way, the homepage doesn't have to list your posts.
If you recall,
this setting we looked at in the Reading settings menu in a previous video can
be used to switch your homepage to a custom page instead of your list of posts.
Next, while looking at this post, you'll notice that the date is included here,
and that's the second difference between posts and pages.
Posts always display their date and oftentimes the post author's name too,
but pages do not. If I click on the title to view the full post,
you'll see the same information appears in the byline here.
Where this information shows up on your site and how it's styled will depend on
the theme you choose, but it's normally displayed somewhere near the title.
If you look at the bottom of the post, you'll see this "Uncategorized" link.
By default,
your posts will be added into a category called Uncategorized unless you assign
them to a custom category you've added to your site.
I can click on this link to see all posts listed in the Uncategorized category.
We'll take a closer look at categories in an upcoming video,
but this brings us to the final main difference between posts and pages.
Posts can have categories and tags, but pages do not use either.
To summarize these differences, one more time...
Posts are displayed on the blog, while pages need to be linked to from the menu.
Posts display their publication date while pages do not.
And posts use categories and tags while pages do not.
There are some other minor differences,
but those are the three main ways that posts and pages differ from each other.
Due to these variations, we use posts and pages quite differently on our sites.
You should use blog posts for the following types of content:
news and announcements, tutorials, product reviews, list posts,
and editorials and opinion pieces.
You should use pages for your about page, your contact page,
your privacy policy and terms of service, any sales pages you need,
and a custom homepage. In practice,
you'll create a few foundational pages while creating your website,
and then you'll mainly publish posts moving forward.
Now that you understand the key differences between posts and pages,
let's move on to the next video where you'll learn how to create your first blog
post.