[wp-hackers] do pages and posts make sense?

[Mark Jaquith]

On May 19, 2006, at 3:45 AM, Markus Lutzer wrote:

> Solution 1: Pages are also created on a specific date; why not use  
> this
> date when they should be listed in a chronological order?

Because that is the primary difference between pages and posts.   
Posts have a chronological flow.  Pages are chronologically agnostic.

> With respect to your opinion I think it would be an advantage for the
> users to be free in choice. As I already wrote it would also make the
> concept of WP more understandable. I guess many first-time-users are
> thinking "what is the difference between Post and Page?

I've not seen this confusion.  When people hear "post" they think  
"blog post," i.e. chronological entries.  When they hear "page" they  
think "contact page" or "about page" i.e. non-chronological entries.

Freedom of choice, for anything that is less than moderately popular,  
is accommodated though the plugin system.  WordPress 2.1 is gaining  
the ability to have arbitrary post types... so "categorized_page"  
could be created, and it could behave as you like.

> I would like to use categories for pages to have some categories in  
> the
> main navigation menu. The user should be able to continue to a  
> specific
> page by selecting in a sub-menu after she selected one category.

One way to do this would be via parent page containers.  If I were  
going to do it with categories, I'd probably make my own page2cat  
table to manage the associations without interfering with post2cat.

Bottom line is that this isn't something that the average user is  
going to want, and it'd just add coding, debugging, maintenance,  
documentation, and usage headaches if it were included in core.  I'd  
write it as a plugin for the WordPress 2.1 branch.  That way, you and  
the people who want this functionality can have it, but ordinary  
users (and developers) aren't burdened by a minority-use feature.

--
Mark Jaquith
http://txfx.net/