Not sure where to post this, so I posted it here.

I'm trying to unravel and understand the practical differences between Entries and Pages and when I would choose to use one over the other. Basically, Pages seem intended to produce "standalone" pages, while Entries are for more conventional blog-type pages that appear one after another, either on a main index page, or in a Next/Previous sequence, or both.

When I compare Entries and Pages, although there appear to be many more MT tags associated with Entries, it seems that the main tags for Entries have a corresponding tag for Pages.

Like Entries, Pages can be made to appear in sequence on a published page, and you can create Next/Previous navigation for them. Pages can have Comments, Trackbacks, Tags, Excerpts, and Keywords. (Pages don't have an "Extended" tab on their form, yet there is a MTPageMore tag to output an Extended field. Hmmm.)

The main difference seems be that Entries can be organized into Categories, while Pages are organized into Folders. But most of the MT tags available for Categories seem to have their corresponding tags for Folders, likewise for Entry Sub-Categories and Page Sub-Folders. And even though Pages are organized by "folders," MT categories are also really folders under the site root; both Categories and Folders have their basename and their display name.

I haven't explored this in depth so there are subtleties I'm surely missing. But for the most part, Pages appear to be a parallel type of content that can in most respects function identically to Entries.

The default MT4 templates present Entries and Pages differently as far as how they're presented and listed, and how those lists are formatted, and which metadata properties are used in the published pages. For example, the templates don't include Permalink, Comment, or Trackback links under Page titles, but they can be easily added. Nor is there an index template that publishes all of the Pages in sequence, but one could easily be made -- the necessary MTPage-related tags apparently exist.

There are only a few differences between Pages and Entries that I've noticed. When you go to Preferences > Blog Settings, there is no page for setting up how Pages are published, so (as far as I've found) there is no way to change the publishing default settings for Pages, e.g., so that the default is Published rather than Unpublished, or whether to accept Comments, Trackbacks, or setting the default text formatting. (This seems to reflect the fact that Pages are a new feature and the MT4 interface is out of sync with the new feature set.)

Another difference is that, the Manage Pages page lists the individual Pages in "Last Modified" order (so if you edit an early one, it will jump to the top of the list), while the Manage Entries page lists them in the order they were "Created." It doesn't change the publication date (as it shouldn’t), but I'm not sure that changing the order they're listed in makes a lot of sense.

Another difference is that the tags you apply to Pages are not reflected in Tag Clouds and Tag list counts, even though when you click on a tag, the search results page intersperses both Entries and Pages when it shows the results. There seems to be a blurry distinction between Entries and Pages in terms of tag functionality, which seems to reflect the fact that there really is very little difference between Entries and Pages in how they actually work; MT's tag functionality seems to straddle that difference, considering them the same for search purposes, but different for listing purposes. Perhaps there's some way of having the tag cloud/list pull from and combine both Entries and Pages? As it is, the default Tag containers could easily lead to a misrepresentation of a site's content if the site publishes both Entries and Pages, and both of those use tags. Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't seem quite right.

Sort of related to that, while Pages use Folders instead of Categories, it seems that conceptually they're pretty much the same thing: a way to organize content by either (lowercase) category, or some other function. If Pages are to be used for mainline content -- e.g., full articles, rather than, say, About pages or site maps -- then the inability to assign (uppercase) Categories to those Pages seems like a drawback: clicking on a Category link (e.g., Politics) would get you to all the Entries under Politics, but not to any of the Pages that would be categorized as Politics based on their content. Those Pages could be saved in and listed under a Politics folder, but as far as the site's content goes, they're not integrated in terms of how that content is displayed on an index page -- it would appear that you've got two links to "Politics" content, but with different content at each. (This is sort of the opposite of how tag searches work, where the results of clicking on a tag DO integrate both Entries and Pages, even though the tag cloud/list does not.)

(As an aside, it's possible to have a Category called Politics and also a Folder called Politics, and have both Entries and Pages share the same (lowercase) folder under the site root. But the content itself is not integrated.)

I'm not sure what all this adds up to in terms of how to use Entries and Pages, or whether to use Pages for main content. Or maybe the thing to do is to ONLY use Pages for main content, and use Entries only in a conventional "blog-like" way, for shorter or "lighter" content, and perhaps to promote new Pages as they’re published.

It's possible to treat Entry archive pages as "standalone" pages, especially if you put them in a Category that you exclude using the 'category' attribute of the MTEntries tag. That way, its tags would be included in tag clouds and lists, and more accurately reflect the site's content, but the (lowercase) pages themselves would standalone. "Standalone" is a function of whether a page is sequenced in a list or in "scrolling" content. But both Entries and Pages can be either standalone or sequenced, depending on how you use them.

In some ways, Pages gives you the option of creating a parallel side-blog within the main blog, with completely different navigation and a Folders-as-Categories structure.

It's potentially very useful to have these two, nearly identical "tracks" for organizing content within a single blog (though it would be nice if Page publishing settings were available under Preferences, and if Entry and Page tags were either fully differentiated or, better, could be optionally fully integrated.) But I'm not sure how to best use that potential. There's also no doubt a lot that I'm overlooking and that I simply don't understand.

Was there a grand vision by Six Apart for how Pages might be used differently than, or along side of, Entries?

I'd be very interested in hearing how others are using Pages.

Overall, you're thinking about this way too much and making it seem a lot more complicated than it really is. I can't really commit to slicing away at everything below, so I'll provide a couple notes, and then maybe you can come back with what your actual problems are(if any) in summary rather than them being buried in all the wondering what's what.


At the lowest level, this is about it. Really.
Pages are supposed to be single "pages," and entries are assumed to be part of a stream of items, eg. blog posts.
Previously, managing standalone pages required either setting up a separate blog, or doing annoying gymnastics like dumping them in with the blog posts and remembering to filter them out of your entry listings somehow, like setting aside a category for them. The pages system takes care of all of that for you by removing them from the stream.


A lot of this is because as far as the database is concerned, pages and entries are more or less the same kind of object; they're even stored in the same table. It might be best for you to think of pages are being a special form entry that you can tell to be in a specific place idependent of any other, via the folders.
You should also note that folders are similarly a special form of category. And if you get into the source code, you'll find that a lot of the MTPage* tags don't have their own routines, but just point at the MTEntry* tag code.

It's possible that your confusion is partially coming about from thinking about this too linearly because of not having found yourself in a situation where the differences are important. What you define as the main difference between folders and cats, for example, is an assumption based on convention, but it's not true for all cases.
Consider that while a page will always need a place(folder/directory) to be, a site may use categories as a purely organizational tool on the back end, eg. not producing category archives at all.
Also remember that while folders by definition generally imply a specific location:

...means [...]/folder/subfolder/page-title.html (more or less), a category structure of:

could end up as [...]/category/sub-category/entry-title.html or just [...]/category/entry-title.html or even [...]/archives/category-entry-title.html (Yes, I've really seen this.) Categories are organization, but not necessarily location. And no, there isn't anything stopping you from doing the same with folders(MT generally does little to limit what you can do), but this is a minor point.



I don't know what's wrong with your install, but mine do.

Thanks Su. Perhaps I am overthinking it a bit. What you've said though does seem to confirm my impression that Entries and Pages are really just minor variations of the same species of object. I'm preparing to dump a whole bunch of existing content into MT and trying to figure out what should be an Entry, what should be a Page, and how to best organize it all. So I'm afraid some overthinking comes with the territory.

I would still like to see addressed (or be corrected if I'm misunderstanding something) the way Page tags are NOT included when tag clouds/lists are complied, but DO show in the tag search results. Is there either a reason why it works this way, or a way around it? It seems to be a "neither here nor there" way of handling tags, as far as using them to represent a site's content.

As for this:


You’re absolutely right. And it WAS strange when I noticed what seemed to be the absence of an Extended tab on the Create Page form -- and I clearly remember looking at the form, not seeing the Extended tab, and switching over to a Create Entry form to compare it to. In fact, that’s what led me to confirm that there was in fact an MTPageMore tag, cos it seemed strange that there wouldn't be. I can only guess that it was either a hallucination or -- possibly? maybe? -- I was looking at one of those mysterious "grayed out" incomplete forms and didn't realize it...? In any case, I'll go back and correct my original post.

Thanks as always for your insights.