What is a post format?
A post format is used by a theme for presenting posts in a certain format and style, such as “standard”, “image”, “gallery” “audio”, “video”, “quote”, “status”, “aside”, “link” and/or a “chat” post. You can actually read thorough explanation of post formats on WordPress codex pages. (Post formats should not be confused with post types!)
There is a problem, though
Post formats styling and support is left solely for a theme you are using. And there is no standardized way of displaying post formats. So, this can change from theme to theme:
- one theme can only distinguish post formats simply with an icon,
- the other one goes further by displaying actual format media and/or text automatically, taken from post content,
- another theme may even require setting up a special post custom field to display post format media,
- yet another theme may not support all post formats, just a few of them…
This means that post formats are not very future-proof and are actually quite confusing to a lot of WordPress users to set up, and to your website visitors due to display inconsistency.
Besides, a standard post can also be any of the other post formats as well. It can have a gallery or a video, for example. Most users simply ignore post formats because of these decision complications.
Why this theme doesn’t support post formats?
WebMan Design themes are built for ease of use, reducing decision pressure.
WebMan Design themes are not cluttered with redundant options that might only confuse users or create unnecessary decision pressure on them.
This theme is also not primarily a blog theme, but rather a business one, so, introducing the support for post formats is very questionable and thus it was removed to make things simpler and help you focus on the most important thing of your website: the actual content.
But, I may want to use them in the future…
Well, you can still reintroduce the post formats compatibility in your child theme.
Alternatively you may use post tags: simply tag all your (to-be-)video format posts with a “Video” tag, for example. Then, if you decide to use a theme with post formats supports in the future, you can easily convert all the posts marked with “Video” tag to a video format using WordPress posts bulk edit.
Surely, the child theme solution is preferable as it will prepare your posts much more elegantly, although it is also more technically challenging solution as you have to dive into coding a bit.
And what if I already used post formats previously?
If you used post formats previously on your WordPress website and switched to a theme that does not support them, your posts will simply display as standard posts. To retain the ability to assign a post format for any new post, you can declare the support in a child theme.
Summary
In my opinion, post formats are not suited for business websites (but may be suited for blogs). That’s why this theme does not support them to prevent user confusion.
If you still need to use post formats, declare the compatibility in a child theme.
