Having worked extensively is several different CMS environments, I quickly came to realize that each project approaches a similar set of functional requirements using its’ own unique approach. While no approach is necessarily more “right” than another, trying to overpower and bully one project to behave more like another is counterproductive.

Planning a successful WordPress site starts with an appreciation of the structure of the environment, which is comprised of several key concepts:

• Post Types – By default WordPress comes with two distinct post types “pages” and “posts” and supplemental types can be added via plugins. Each post type will have a series of attributes that make them unique.
• Taxonomies – The default “post” post type allows the assignment of taxonomy terms to individual posts. Queries for collections of posts which share a taxonomy term have been provided for in WordPress core code and are a powerful method to organize content.
• Templates – within each theme are layout templates that define the layout for different conditions, and multiple templates can be made available for any post type.
• Template Parts – templates will often contain template parts (header, footer, sidebar, etc.) which contain content which is constant from “node to node”.

A deeper dive can be found in the following articles: