Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Pages with Category & Tag.

If you’ve spent any time working with WordPress, you’ll know that out of the box, the platform treats posts and pages very differently. Posts get all the organisational tools — categories, tags, archives — while pages are left on their own, floating without any taxonomy support at all. That’s where the Pages with Category & Tag plugin comes in, and today we’re going to walk you through exactly what it does and how NZRT puts it to work.

So let’s start with the problem it solves. When you create a standard WordPress page — think your About page, your Contact page, a Services overview — WordPress gives you no built-in way to group or label those pages with categories or tags. They just exist independently, with no organisational structure connecting them. For a small site with five or ten pages, that’s probably fine. But once you’re managing dozens or even hundreds of pages covering different departments, content types, or business units, that gets messy very quickly.

The Pages with Category & Tag plugin fixes that by bringing the same taxonomy tools you already know from posts and applying them directly to pages. Once it’s active, you can do things you simply couldn’t do before.

Let’s go through the five main features. First, you get page categories. Just like you’d assign a blog post to a category, you can now assign any page to one too. This lets you group related pages together in a logical way. Second, there are page tags. Tags work differently from categories — they’re more freeform and keyword-based — and now your pages can carry them as well, making it easier to surface related content across the site.

Third, the plugin adds archive pages. If you navigate to a category or tag that contains pages, WordPress will now generate an archive view listing all of those pages. This is really useful if someone wants to browse everything within a particular grouping without having to search or click through menus. Fourth, there are taxonomy filters, which let you filter your pages by category or tag — handy when you’re managing content behind the scenes and want to quickly find everything in a particular group. And fifth, you get sidebar widgets for page categories and tag clouds. If you want to show visitors a visual list of page categories or a tag cloud in your sidebar, those widgets are now available to you.

Now let’s talk about how NZRT actually uses this plugin, because that’s where it gets practical for your day-to-day work here.

NZRT uses page categories primarily for module organisation. The modules in play include Customer, Sales, Finance, HR, Supplier, and EDM. So if you’re building out or maintaining pages that belong to one of those business areas, you should be assigning the appropriate page category when you publish. This makes it much easier to manage those sections as the site grows — you can quickly pull up all Finance pages, for example, or filter to see everything under HR without digging through the entire page list manually.

Beyond modules, NZRT also uses page categories for department pages, so pages that belong to a specific internal team or division get categorised accordingly. There’s also provision for regional pages, which would apply if content needs to be segmented by geographic area. And finally, content type pages fall into this system too — things like case studies and testimonials get grouped under their own category so they’re easy to find and manage as a distinct content type.

The core idea behind all of this is that WordPress pages, as powerful as they are for building a structured site, benefit enormously from some extra organisational scaffolding once the volume of content grows. The plugin provides that scaffolding without changing how pages fundamentally work. You’re not rethinking your page structure — you’re just adding a layer of taxonomy on top of what you already have.

If you’re ever adding new pages to the NZRT WordPress site, keep this in mind: check whether the page belongs to one of the established categories before you publish. Leaving pages uncategorised works against the whole point of having this plugin active. And if you think a new category might be needed — say for a new business unit or content type — that’s worth flagging with the team rather than creating unofficial categories without alignment.

This plugin sits alongside other tools documented in the NZRT wiki, including notes on post types and taxonomies more broadly, page structure and navigation, and the general plugins overview. Those are all worth a read if you want the fuller picture of how the WordPress setup here is organised.

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