Living Open Source

So now you have got your hands on WordPress and you have probably had a go at writing your first post. In this tutorial we’ll get our heads around posts and pages. I have discovered that understanding the difference between a post and a page, and when to use them on your church blog is the most important and sometimes difficult concept for a newcomer to get their heads around.

Post, Pages – what’s the difference?

The regular content of a Blog is made up of articles that are called Posts in WordPress. You are currently reading a post on my blog. For a church, these posts might include news of a recent event, information about a forthcoming event, some news about the church, latest information about your cell groups or event a podcast of your sermon.

In WordPress though, you can also create another type of content called a Page. Writing a page is almost identical to writing a post. The main difference is that Pages are generally reserved for information that does not change over time. In the default theme, links to your pages appear at the top of the sidebar. For a church site, you would use a page to present contact information, give general information about the church, its life and where to find it.

I find that people who are new to blogging jump into creating lots pages because this type of content is actually most like their existing static church website. They find it easy to copy content across from their old site to the blog and end up with lots of pages. My advice would be, when creating your content avoid pages as much as you can, keeping them to a minimum.

How does it look on a church blog?

Take a look at my church’s website. This site is using my Delta theme for wordpress. Down the left hand sidebar are some links that take you to several pages that give general information about the church. Whereas the central area of the site under news and updates displays the latest few posts that relate to events and news in the life of the church. The main idea here is that by regularly posting about things happening in the church, you begin to share your story.

Write your first post if you haven’t already.

If you haven’t already had a go, login to your dashboard and click on the Write tab.
Give your new post a Title and enter some text in the Post editor.
Click Publish and go and view your site.

A new page is made the same way

You will notice that there is also a Write Page tab. Click the tab, give the page a title and content. Click the Publish button to create the page.

Going further

You can check out the offcial WordPress lessons for more information on these basic concepts. We’ll look at using images in your posts next.