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WEB170 » The Anatomy of a WordPress Site

Now that you are absolutely convinced that WordPress is the most awesome thing next to clean air, let’s take a look at how it works.

The anatomy of a WordPress site can be broken down into two basic camps:

Everything in WordPress is a $post object.

1. Posts: items presented in a chronological and news-like fashion
2. Pages: main and sub categories of your website’s information architecture

Note: Both Pages and Posts are $post objects. :-)

Posts

Postings are the foundation upon which blogs are built.

On a blog, the content consists of articles (also sometimes called “posts” or “entries”) that the author(s) writes.

— http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging

You have probably noticed internship, job, and general announcement emails from me. These are actually postings that I make on this site. I then use a plugin to have them sent to you if you are subscribed to this site.

I have chosen to place my postings on the Home Page of this site:

Anatomy: Postings on the Home Page

You can see that all of my postings show up in a chronological order of when they were published. They can also be broken into categories for easy navigation.

The Home Page of this site then becomes a written record of all of my individual postings:

Anatomy: Postings on the Home Page Detail

Each posting of mine has:

1. Title: the title of the posting can show up as your headline
2. Date: the date will let the reader know when this was posted
3. Category: all postings can be grouped into categories for easy navigation
4. Content: without good or relevant content, everything else will merely be a placeholder

Each posting can also be viewed as an individual web page where a reader can leave a comment:

Anatomy: Single Posting

You can see that Kate & I have had a good conversation here.

Pages

Pages are the typical groups of information in your website information architecture. These groups are usually broken into main categories and sub-categories that get displayed in your site’s navigation.

I use pages to display all of my lecture materials to you:

Anatomy: Pages

This way, all of my lectures, assignments and class pages can be organized into a hierarchical structure that I hope you find to be usable.

I have also been able to publish my (student) content with much more speed and flexibility now that my student website is powered with WordPress.

Yee-haw.