In WordPress, there are two main types of items from both a user and developer standpoint:
- The WordPress Objects
- These are the items you create via the admin menus called Posts, Pages, Tags, Categories, Links, etc.
- Yes, a WordPress Page object is a post by any other name. They share the same database structures and simply have different meta data and coding functions available to them.
- A bit silly if you ask me, but it is what it is.
- The WordPress Templates
- These are the page templates which WordPress uses to display the WordPress Objects.
- These include templates called home, single, page, search, 404, archive, date, category, author, tag, application, etc.
- These are what actually display the WordPress objects.
Confused?
Perhaps not. But once you start seeing people talking about pages, posts, categories, tags, authors, etc., you might well be confused even without knowing it because when someone talks about posts in wordpress they could be talking about the actual wordpress objects or the page templates used by wordpress to display individual post objects.
It is just as bad when talking about Pages.
Keeping Things Straight
When speaking of wordpress functionality, I do my best to add an extra descriptor to what I speak of. On this site, you should normally see Post or Page Template when I am speaking of the template files ( single.php and page.php ) which are used to display individual post and page objects in wordpress and Post or Page Object when I am speaking of the actual WordPress objects which you can create via the built in editing menus.
The Real Difference?
The WordPress templates display content to end users.
The WordPress objects are the content.
Hopefully that clears things up a little.
Unlike most themes I have seen, The Privateer breaks them into completely separate things, fleshing out each template to have a Template Level (HTML Page) construct which has an Object level ( WordPress Post or Page ) display section within it.
Every template in The Privateer can have a Title, a Subtitle, a content area above the post list, a post list ( which displays the wordpress post and page objects! ), a content area below the post list, etc.
That being said, it would make a LOT more sense to change things up a bit and use completely different names for all of the templates than are used for the various wordpress objects.
Discussion would be a lot simpler and explanations would be of a lot more use to newer or less technical users.
Still, WordPress is a pretty nice system…but if there was one feature I’d like to see, it would be to clean up the language used to describe it ( well, that and get rid of automatic content filters…I hate having my html munged by the HTML editor! Leave it alone! If I wanted it processed, I’d use the visual editor! ).
