230 PART IV • Additional Features and Functionality
You might also want to remove the traditional postmeta data if your site won’t employ it. To a
lot of people, showing off timestamps and categories as well as tags and authors will draw the
thoughts to blogs. Remove these parts unless you need them or consider using them in a
more traditional fashion.Lingo
There’s a lot of bloggish lingo within WordPress by default; “categories” and “tags” are used in
the permalinks, for example. You can change these on a URL level in the Permalink Settings.
Maybe you want to go with “news” or “updates” instead of the default “category,” and perhaps
“view” or “topic” rather than the default “tag.” Actually, a good way to create a news section
for a static corporate site is to use Pages for any serious content, such as company information
and product descriptions, whereas you’ll use the one category, called News with the slug
“news,” for the news posts. That way, you can set up your permalinks so that /news/ will be
the category listings, or the News section in this case, and then you let all the posts (which of
course are just news items) get the /news/post-slug/ permalink by applying the
/%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure in the settings. Really handy, and no
need to build a custom news section or anything.You would want more control over the content if you need more than one newsy section,
though, in which case Page templates listing the latest posts from the category in question is a
nice enough solution, as opposed to just linking the category archives. You would go about it
by creating a Page per section and then having a Page template for each of these sections.
Every Page template would contain a custom loop fetching the necessary posts. It all boils
down to what you need to do and how flexible you want the site to be.This inevitably leads into what you can do with static Pages and how what used to be blog
posts can fill the needs of a more traditional website.THE PERFECT SETUP FOR A SIMPLE STATIC WEBSITE
Using static Pages and categories as a news model is truly a great tool whenever you need to
roll out a typical old-school website quickly. Maybe it is a product presentation, a corporate
website, or something entirely different that just won’t work with the blog format. That’s when
this setup is so useful.Pages (as in WordPress Pages) were originally meant to be used for static content. The fact
that you can create one Page template (recall that template files for Pages are individual) for
each Page should you want to means that they can really look like anything. You can break
down your design completely because you don’t even have to call the same header or footer
file, you can have different markup, and you can exclude everything WordPress-related and
display something entirely different instead, should you want to. Pages are really powerful
tools that can just as easily contain multiple loops or syndicated RSS content from other sites.
Each Page template is a blank slate, and it is your primary weapon when using WordPress as a
CMS; this is where you can make the site truly step away from the blog heritage that the
system carries.