Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Post Type Switcher.

If you’ve spent any time managing a WordPress site, you’ve probably run into this situation. You’ve got a blog post that really should be a page, or a page that belongs in a custom post type, and you’re staring at it wondering how to move it without breaking everything. That’s exactly the problem Post Type Switcher solves.

At its core, Post Type Switcher is a WordPress plugin that lets you convert content from one post type to another. So if you’ve written something as a standard blog post and you later realise it actually belongs in your custom post type for case studies, or testimonials, or module pages, you can make that change without losing a single thing. Your content stays intact, your metadata stays intact, your comments stay intact. It just lives under a different post type.

Let’s talk about what the plugin actually gives you. There are five main capabilities worth knowing about.

The first is what the plugin calls Quick Convert. This is a one-click conversion experience. You’re inside a post or page, you make your selection, and the switch happens. No complicated workflow, no export and reimport dance.

The second is Bulk Convert. Rather than opening posts one at a time, you can select multiple pieces of content and convert them all at once. If you’re doing a bigger site reorganisation, this saves a lot of time.

Third is what’s described as Safe Conversion. This is probably the most important one to understand. When you switch a post from one type to another, everything that belongs to that post comes with it. The content itself, the custom fields and metadata, the comment threads. Nothing gets left behind.

Fourth, there’s Hierarchy Support. If you’re working with post types that have parent and child relationships, those relationships are preserved through the conversion. So if you had nested pages or structured content with a parent, that structure stays coherent after the switch.

And fifth, Status Preservation. When you convert a post, it keeps whatever publishing status it had. If it was published, it stays published. If it was a draft, it stays a draft. You’re not accidentally taking live content offline just by changing its type.

Now let’s look at how NZRT actually uses this. There are four main use cases documented for us.

The one you’ll probably encounter most is converting blog posts into module pages. If the team has written something as a news post or a blog entry and it turns out it really belongs as a structured page inside a specific site module, Post Type Switcher handles that transition cleanly.

Similarly, if a page needs to become a product, that’s a straightforward conversion. Same goes in the other direction. The plugin doesn’t care which way you’re going.

The other two use cases are about converting standard posts into testimonials or case studies. These are typically custom post types, and getting content into the right type means it shows up in the right templates and feeds. Rather than recreating a post from scratch inside the correct type, you just switch it.

The underlying reason all of this matters for us is content structure. When you’re running a site with multiple custom post types, it’s easy for content to end up in the wrong bucket, especially early in a project when the structure is still being defined. Post Type Switcher gives you a way to correct that without a data migration headache.

It’s also worth noting what the plugin does not do. It’s not changing your content, it’s not reformatting anything, and it’s not touching your taxonomies or terms in ways that would break associations. It’s genuinely just moving the post from one type to another while keeping everything else as is.

If you want to dig deeper into how post types work in WordPress generally, the wiki cross-references a note on Post Types and Taxonomies, as well as the broader Plugins Overview and WordPress Overview pages. Those are good places to go if you need context on how the ecosystem fits together.

The short version is this. Post Type Switcher is a simple, safe utility that gives you flexibility when your content structure evolves. And in a managed WordPress environment like ours, that kind of flexibility is genuinely useful.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.