When you need a certain layout or set of information for a repeating section of your wordpress website a custom post type (CPT) can work really well.

If your website is in WordPress, you may have noticed sometimes there will be an extra name or an extra button in the menu bar in the administration area.  And what that could be is what we would call a custom post type.  And essentially, it’s a way of setting up information storage for the special part of your website.

So examples might be for a testimonial.  So we would have a box for the testimonial, maybe one for the person’s name and their website address.  And rather than just getting you to type that all into one editing box, we’ll separate it out so that we can control the formatting and you don’t have to worry about whether it’s the right font size or things like that.  It could be things like a portfolio or some other section on the website that has different bits of data that we want to format in a certain way and keep them all standardized.

So that’s how we would use a custom post type.  And it’s just about making it so that if you do delegate updating the website to someone, or you’re doing it yourself, you don’t have to be stressed about the style.  You just get to put the information in and it comes up.