Help me understand WordPress terminology

  • I am new to WordPress and struggling with all the features & terminology. We want to build an automotive photo site that will sort the same photos in two different methods.

    In the default display, we would show a series of buttons, each would open a page of photos of a specific vehicle. (Sort by name or number?), i.e., Clicking Button1 would display all pictures of Fords, Button2=Chevrolet, etc.

    As a second choice, the user could select a series of buttons that would display certain features, pulling pictures from the same data except by tag(?)(or category?) rather by Name(?), i.e., Pushing ButtonHood would display pictures of hoods of various vehicles, Pushing ButtonDoor would display pictures of doors of various vehicles.

    As the data was loaded into the files, we would add by name, ie Ford1, Ford2, Ford3 and also tag each photo with features it displayed, ie hood, door, engine

    Sorry, I don’t understand the terminology to be able to pick a portfolio theme that would do this. Or is this just basic WordPress and most all will do it?

    Can anyone give me a basic understanding of files, tags, categories to wrap my head around it.

    thanks

    Paul

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  • WordPress is based on posts, which is whatever you put into the editor, and is saved in the database. There can be different post types. The standard types are Page (which is hierarchical with no taxonomies) and Posts (which are sorted by date by default and have two taxonomies: category and tag).
    Behind the scenes, any media files that you upload are also stored in the posts table, and are given the post type of “attachment”, with no taxonomies.
    You can use a plugin to define a custom post type and call it whatever you want. You can also define custom taxonomies.

    What you describe is all about the images, so you can use normal Posts that contain galleries of images. The Post would have the category (like Ford), and the tags could be all the parts in the images. But it sounds like you would do better with each image is a Post (or each Post is a description with an image), so that the category and tags apply to one image, and you can narrow the results for the various parts better that way.
    You could get a plugin that adds taxonomies to images, but you still need a good way for the theme to show the images, since the attachment type is internal and doesn’t have archive pages.
    There are also many plugins that do all the management of the images separately from WP, with taxonomies too, but doing it separate means the information is not available to other plugins. It’s best to keep it “the WordPress way” so all plugins can interact with the same data and WP hooks.

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