The two default post types in WordPress are called posts and pages. These two post types are intended to be used for blog posts and build pages that display information about the site. In modern sites, developers are using pages to provide highly dynamic content, interactive features, and data capturing through shortcodes added to a page. In real-world applications, we need to manage different types of content and hence the use of normal posts is not practical. The following are some examples of the use of content types in real-world applications:

• Job submission and listing in a job management application
• Courses and lesson management in a learning management system
• Products and orders for an e-commerce site

The custom post type feature was introduced to handle these kinds of content types without interrupting the process and design of normal blog posts. The custom post type feature in WordPress provides all the features of normal posts by default. We can extend the custom post types using available hooks to manage the advanced requirements of applications.

In this recipe, we are going to create a new custom post type called book to handle books in an online shop or library. We are also going to look at how to use the existing book features in the backend.