What are the design constraints of WP pages?

[Laurens]

Why not use posts instead of pages... It's not like using posts is going to make your site a "blog". Think of post and pages as different ways of managing web pages. ....

Given the content of my site, each post would have to be placed on a single page. Initially this made it unclear to me why I should bother using posts as it only seemed to add a layer of complexity without any immediate benefits. I have yet to find a clear comparison anywhere on the web between using pages or posts to create a strictly hierarchical web sit containing around 500 web pages.

Navigation for users isn't the problem. I am sure that as my site grows, I'll find appropriate solutions for that. In fact 85% of my visitors find a particular page using a search engine, browse 1.55 pages and leave - which means that extensive navigation tools aren't that important.

What I worry about is the administrator panel of Wordpress itself. Managing that much content is getting difficult. I am afraid to run into something like 'the dropdown menu to select the parent page of a page is limited to 1024 entries'. When I'd run into such a limitation, everyone would say 'well, you're not using Wordpress as a blog, so bad luck'. Hence my question on the design constraints of the software. If WordPress is intentionally not designed to handle more than 512 pages, I'd like to know that!

[JohnM]

@Laurens

You could probably set up a test server and use the Mass Page Maker plugin to fill a installation with some thousand pages to test.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mass-page-maker/

[Jeffro]

Interesting thread going on here. I've seen the issue of pages talked about on the hackers mailing list before regarding optimizations and such. Anytime someone says they would like to put a few thousand pages into WordPress I ask them why. I don't understand what the benefits are of having a few thousand pages when you can turn those into a few thousand posts and on top of that, be able to categorize and tag those articles for easier organization.

I think the answer to your question Laurens is to use Posts instead of Pages.

[dancole]

I think some confusion about WordPress pages and posts comes from the fact that a file displayed on a browser is called a web page. The WordPress software stores pages and posts in the same database and table. The difference between the two is only how WordPress displays them in the backend and how themes (and some WordPress functions for themes) use the two different categories (which are "pages" and "posts").

I'm thinking that WordPress might handle a large volume of posts better than it would pages, because some websites come out with thousands of articles using the post category. The reasoning behind this is the efficiency of the functions that fetch information from the database. Some page functions are designed to get all the pages by default, while there isn't one that gets all posts by default. Imagen if Problogger used some function to display all of this 5,000 articles on a single page, even if it was just the titles. If you do have a navigational bar displaying every "page" you've ever created, I'd get rid of it, because visitors don't want to pick between 400 some pages and your efficiency is going to drop. The same also applies to the backend, you shouldn't want to see hundreds on titles in a list.

The biggest reason I'd use posts over pages for your website pages, is due to how WordPress designed pages and posts to be used and how theme developers envisioned pages and posts to be used. Besides that, visitors aren't going to know the difference if your site's design / theme is developed in a non-blog type fashion.

Also, do you know that you can have one and only one "post" on a web page. You can also have more than one "page" on a web page. It just depends on how the WordPress Theme's templates are setup.

[andrea_r]

Given the content of my site, each post would have to be placed on a single page.

And they can already. The single post page. (oops, terminology again...)

[Laurens]

I know since quite some time that a single post can be used on a page but the first months or so of using WordPress, when I created my site, that wasn't clear at all. All the documentation that I read pointed to advantages of posts that were irrelevant for what I had in mind. Maybe the codex needs a better explanation on this.

Looking at posts, the one key advantage that I now see is the ability to structure them in categories, which you can use as a filter in the admin window.

As some of you have pointed out, performance might also be better with posts.

I assume you can use categories to build a hierarchy of posts, sub-posts and sub-post-posts, with the same hierarchy also acting as a navigational tree. That was what initially attracted me to the use of pages.

Anyway, I would only consider reworking the entire site if I could find a migration tool from pages to posts (maintaining comments) and a way of maintaining all URL's in that move. Without that I might as well move to Drupal (which is incredibly popular here in Belgium, given its origins).