Over the last couple of days, I have been playing around with Wordpress, assessing it’s suitability as a content management system as opposed to a package like Joomla. One of the first things I had to get my head around was ‘Do I use posts or pages to achieve my goals?’. My learnings & opinion on this issue is, it depends on a case by case basis and the type of content you are trying to publish. I have put together my opinion below on the pros and cons of using pages and posts when using Wordpress as a content management system.

Posts

Pros

• Comes with tagging abilities which allows you to generate more pages for the search engines around each tag
• You can create a navigation hierarchy by using categories and even place custom text on each category page by hacking at the code a little. See some custom category page ideas here
• Your posts are automatically pinged to blog syndication sites, increasing visibility of the post

Cons

• Posts are related to a time and date which is great for blogs, but not so good for static content
• It is hard to create a good navigation structure with posts with default settings (you can hack the code to make it a little easier) See category page hacks

Summary

You could use posts in Wordpress and still achieve your content management system goals. Category pages would become your higher level page, Sub-category pages would work like a subpage and then each post assigned to that category/sub category would show up on their respective pages. You would want to tweak the “Archives” page, to show the excerpt and not the whole post, otherwise you are going to run into duplicate content issues with the search engines. You could also take advantage of the tagging abilities, and generate more pages optimised for the search engines (again duplicate content issues would have to be taken into consideration).

Pages

Pros

• Easy to create pages and sub pages, to make a logical hierarchy navigation structure without having to customise any code
• Not time/date sensitive
• Control over page ordering in the nav structure

Cons

• Pages do not support tagging (although I think you can install a plugin to create tags for pages)
• Pages are not submitted to the blog syndication networks

Summary

Pages are a great way to setup a basic CMS. You do miss out on the tagging and syndication positives that come with posts, but the control over the page structure and content is far superior when using pages.

Overall Summary

Again, depending on the objectives on your site, your end solution and views on pages/posts will differ. You could use a hybrid model, where you have your pages with all static content, and occasionally post time sensitive information through posts. If you have enough time and expertise in coding, I am sure you could tweak the wordpress code to make a good CMS without needing pages.

If you were creating a website for a local business that wants basic information on the site (home, about us, services, contact us, etc) then I would use pages. If you were building a site for a company that was wanting to communicate with its customers new products/services, but still have their static content, I would use a hybrid model of pages and posts.

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