Terminology: Pages, posts, comments, tags, parents & children
Within WordPress you will be creating two kinds of documents – pages and posts. Pages are reference-type documents; they do not change very often, but they usually contain text and information site visitors frequently refer to. Web pages with contact information or a staff listings would be candidates for pages. Posts, on the other hand, tend to be more time sensitive. A post is the latest information on a topic or issue. You might think of it as a notice or a news article. Usually posts are the heart of your Web site, and WordPress is geared toward managing posts.
Each post you create needs to be filed under some category you designate. If you do not designate a category, WordPress slaps “Uncategorized” or some other default category on the post. You may assign several categories to one post, but generally that is not a good idea. Use categories sparingly as your main information organization scheme. You may also specify tags to be associated with a post. Tags are like keywords that you assign to your document. They are more free form, and their main use is to provide alternative ways to retrieve or group documents.
Pages and categories may have children. It’s easy to think of subcategories. So if you have a large category like “news” and a subcategory like “state news,” you could designate “state news” as a child of news. This is an organizational convenience. If you choose to list all “news” that listing may include all children of news, including “state news” and “local news.” Pages may also have children as a convenience for organizing content.
WordPress manages all your content in a database, but the way your content is presented – its look and feel, color scheme, layout and so forth is determined by a group of files that together comprise a “theme.” One of the great benefits of using a system like WordPress is that you can redesign your Web site by installing a new theme. All of your content remains intact as part of the database on your server. How the content looks on screen is determined by the theme.