Categorizing Pages and Posts in Wordpress

Having authored a plugin to display sub categories on wordpress, I’m often faced with users that realize they can’t use categories on pages, and they turn to me to explain how can be done. This post is meant to help all these people that want to learn why they can’t use categories on pages and, show you that this doesn’t mean you can’t categorize pages at all.

Pages and subpages

In a conventional CMS, pages within a web site are classified in sections and subsections. Each section tipically contain a description of what the section is about and links to its subsections and pages.

Each CMS has its own way to do it and often its own jargon but, ultimately, it is the same philosophy.

Wordpress is not different in this respect. If you want to use it to run a regular (non-blog) web-site, you can.

Wordpress has a feature called pages, which are very similar to posts in many aspects, but they differ, essentially, in the fact that there is no chronology associated to it, pretty much like traditional web pages.

In order to run a non-blog website with Wordpress, you’ll rely on pages, rather than posts, to publish your content, and this also means that the publish date of this content will be much less important than in a blog, if important at all.

That might be good enough for a small site with half a dozen pages, but what if you have slightly bigger ambitions and you need to categorize your content?

Time for an example

Say you run a cooking site (not blog!) and you need the following pages/sections: Recipes, Desserts, Nutritional facts and an About page.

In Wordpress, the way to do it is to create a page for each one. Each page in Wordpress can have a parent page and all pages can be parents as well. These will be the topmost pages, so they have no parent but some of these pages will also work as sections by being parents of other pages.

For the rest of the content, each time you publish a recipe, you will create a page for it, and you will set the main recipes page as a parent. In this way, all recipes are sub pages of the recipes page, and the recipes page immediately becomes a category, as much as a page.

The same goes for the recipes and nutritional facts, but let’s give a bit of attention to the about page.

Although the about page will be categorized as a root page and be on the same level than the main categories, the about page can merely be a plain a simple page with no children.

Because of the way pages are categorized as sub-pages of other pages, you don’t have to distinguish sections from regular pages. In addition, if one day you want to add sections the the about page (eg, about the authors, our history, etc) you can simply create the pages and set the about page as parent.

Thanks to the ability to create different page templates, you can even style each section or page differently.

Posts and categories

For a person with a background stronger in blogs than in static websites, categories might seem missing for pages on Wordpress, but actually is the other way around. For someone coming from a static sites background, the problem might seem to be quite the opposite.

The only basic difference between pages in static sites and posts in a blog is that posts follow a chronological sequence, while pages just sit there and the sequence in which they were written is not quite important.

Although this is the only remarkable difference, this radically changes the way authors and readers approach to each kind of website, and consequently the features a CMS needs to implement for each one.

For instance, blogs are meant to be followed over time. The latest information is supposed to be the most important at a given time and that is why posts are presented in reverse chronological order. It shouldn’t have to be like this, but is quite convenient.

Now, having said that, this doesn’t imply that older posts aren’t useful, and they should be made available in and presented in an organized way. But because the chronological factor, a blog has a few extra challenges on the organization subject.

• Usually, much more content is created for a blog than for a static site
• With the continuous addition of new content, classifications can grow obsolete pretty quicly
• New sections may be needed and accommodate them must be made easy
• Posts might belong to more than one section as time goes by

Regarding a section of pages as a page on itself does make sense, but a post section being regarded as a post makes no sense at all. I explain:

A post is characterized as such by its chronological aspect while categories’ creation date on themselves usually have no importance at all. Hence, there is no sense in regarding a category as a post. Actually, if you come to think of it, this paragraph is almost unnecessary as this though is pretty much counter-intuitive.

Enter categories!

Categories are simply a name you can create and you can relate posts with, pretty much as parent pages.

And similarities don’t stop there. A category might have a parent category, just like pages.

Also, you might not be aware, but Wordpress allow you to create different pages for displaying each category, so if you have a limited number of them or if you want to highlight some, you can actually style a template that work as parent page in most aspects. But this is out of the scope of this post and in material for a future discussion.