Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Post Types and Taxonomies.

If you’ve ever wondered how WordPress decides what kind of content you’re looking at, post types are the answer. Every piece of content in WordPress belongs to a post type, and each type has its own rules about what it can do and how it behaves.

Out of the box, WordPress gives you three default post types. First, you have posts. These are your classic blog-style articles. They support comments, they can be sorted into categories, and you can attach tags to them. Second, you have pages. Pages are for static content, things that don’t really change often, like an About page or a Contact page. Unlike posts, pages don’t have a publication date and they don’t support comments. Third, you have attachments. These are your media files, things like images, videos, and documents that you upload through the media library.

On top of those defaults, WordPress lets developers create what are called Custom Post Types. You can think of these as entirely new content categories that you define yourself. Common examples are things like videos, products, or testimonials. When a custom post type doesn’t quite fit into a standard blog post, you build a new one that does exactly what you need.

Now, how do you actually create one of these custom post types? There’s a WordPress function called register post type, and when a developer calls it, they pass in a few key settings. They give the post type a name, in one example that would be video. They set it to public so it shows up on the site. They list the features it supports, things like a title, a main content editor, and a featured image or thumbnail. They can also switch on an archive page, so all videos can be listed in one place, and they can set a custom URL slug, so the web address reads something clean like slash videos.

That’s it in plain terms. You’re telling WordPress this new type exists, what it looks like, and where to find it.

Now let’s talk about taxonomies, because they work alongside post types to keep everything organised. A taxonomy is basically a way to group and label your content.

WordPress ships with two default taxonomies. Categories are hierarchical, meaning you can have parent categories and child categories nested inside them. They’re great for broad groupings. Tags on the other hand are non-hierarchical, flat lists of keywords. You’d use tags for more specific descriptive terms.

Just like with post types, you can also create custom taxonomies. Examples would be something like genres for a music site, regions for a local news site, or partners for a business directory. Any grouping logic that doesn’t fit neatly into categories or tags can get its own custom taxonomy.

Now, in the NZRT context, this matters a lot. NZRT’s WordPress setup uses a flexible post type and taxonomy structure that mirrors how Dolibarr, the ERP system, organises things by module. Pages in WordPress are mapped to Dolibarr modules, things like Customer, Sales, Finance, and HR. Custom taxonomies are then used to handle the category structure for each of those modules. So the two systems speak a similar language when it comes to how content is grouped and presented.

If you want to go deeper, the related areas to look at are WordPress Overview, Page Structure and Navigation, and Module Category Pages. Those will give you the fuller picture of how everything connects.

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