WordPress comes with five default post types: post, page, attachment, revision, and menu.

While developing your plugin, you may need to create your own specific content type: for example, products for an e-commerce website, assignments for an e-learning website, or movies for a review website.

Using Custom Post Types, you can register your own post type. Once a custom post type is registered, it gets a new top-level administrative screen that can be used to manage and create posts of that type.

To register a new post type, you use the register_post_type() function.

The following minimal example registers a new post type, Products, which is identified in the database as wporg_product.

function wporg_custom_post_type() {
	register_post_type('wporg_product',
		array(
			'labels'      => array(
				'name'          => __('Products', 'textdomain'),
				'singular_name' => __('Product', 'textdomain'),
			),
				'public'      => true,
				'has_archive' => true,
		)
	);
}
add_action('init', 'wporg_custom_post_type');

Please visit the reference page for register_post_type() for the description of arguments.

Naming Best Practices

It is important that you prefix your post type functions and identifiers with a short prefix that corresponds to your plugin, theme, or website.

URLs

A custom post type gets its own slug within the site URL structure.

A post of type wporg_product will use the following URL structure by default: http://example.com/wporg_product/%product_name%.

wporg_product is the slug of your custom post type and %product_name% is the slug of your particular product.

The final permalink would be: http://example.com/wporg_product/wporg-is-awesome.

You can see the permalink on the edit screen for your custom post type, just like with default post types.

A Custom Slug for a Custom Post Type

To set a custom slug for the slug of your custom post type all you need to do is add a key => value pair to the rewrite key in the register_post_type() arguments array.

Example:

function wporg_custom_post_type() {
	register_post_type('wporg_product',
		array(
			'labels'      => array(
				'name'          => __( 'Products', 'textdomain' ),
				'singular_name' => __( 'Product', 'textdomain' ),
			),
			'public'      => true,
			'has_archive' => true,
			'rewrite'     => array( 'slug' => 'products' ), // my custom slug
		)
	);
}
add_action('init', 'wporg_custom_post_type');

The above will result in the following URL structure: http://example.com/products/%product_name%