Convert WordPress pages to posts
I like WordPress, but I don't like the WordPress page system at all. That's why I recently converted all my plugin pages to posts. My main reasons for doing so were:
- Pages can't be tagged
- Pages don't have categories
- Pages and posts don't mix too well in custom loops
- Pages don't appear in your RSS feed
- Posts are better for usability and SEO
I converted the pages with the help of the excellent p2pConverter plugin. Converting the pages is very easy. The plugin adds a "convert to post" button to every page on the page overview. Just click it, confirm, and you're basically done. Of course, having more features for posts makes it necessary to perform a few additional steps after the conversion to get the full benefit:
- The category will be your default category, you probably want to change that
- The new post has no tags. The whole point of converting the pages (for me) was to add tags.
- As a safeguard I added 301 redirects to my server config from the old page address to the new post. The plugin or WordPress seems to do this anyway, but I wanted to be 100% sure nothing breaks in the future. Besides, doing this in the webserver saves a few PHP calls.
One thing that isn't ideal is that all converted posts were added to the top of my RSS feed, even though their publishing date is the same as that of the former page. I'm not sure it's possible to work around this, but I don't think it's a big deal if you're only dealing with a few pages.
Do you think this would apply when your blog is just a part of a much larger website? I've a thesis site that has many, many pages, and many posts. I publish both pages and posts, and nave noticed the deficiency you mention in pages...yet the permanence of pages makes me like them. Many become unnavigable within the site if you forget to link to them, still analytic s reveal large results online.
I don't use many pages on any website I build. Usually it's posts + one or many custom post types. The CPTs support categories, tags, custom taxonomies etc which makes them much more usable. I'm not sure what you mean by permanence tbh, I see no difference between posts and pages here (unless you forget to link to all pages).
Will posts get more traffic than pages?
Not necessarily, but they are easiert to categorize for search engines if you use the tools at hand, tags and categories.
Some plugins need a page to work - I think Fast Secure Contact Form may be one of these, and a custom login page I use.
I download the wordpress but i don't understand how to add the plugings. Can u explain it.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Managing_Plugins