There are nine post formats in WordPress, and its up to the active theme whether to support them. Most WordPress themes today don’t have post format support, but it’s a fairly common feature for WordPress themes on the WordPress.org them directory. If the active theme has support for post formats, a “Post Format” meta box is displayed in the right column when editing a post.
The following post formats are available in WordPress:
- Aside: Usually displayed without a title.
- Audio: A single audio file, or a playlist of audio files. Usually displayed with an audio embed.
- Chat: A transcript of a chat.
- Gallery: A gallery of images.
- Image: A single image, either the featured image or the first embedded image in the post content.
- Link: A link to an external site. The first link in the post content is usually given a different styling with this post format.
- Quote: A quotation, usually in the form of the HTML
blockquoteelement. - Status: A short, Twitter-esque status update.
- Video: A single video, or a playlist of videos. Usually displayed with a video embed, either from the media library or from an external service like YouTube.
These are in addition to the “Standard” post format, which is the default format for blog posts. Unlike most other features in WordPress, post formats aren’t extendable. WordPress doesn’t support the list being expanded with additional formats by either themes or plugins. The reasons given are that it standardises post formats between different themes and makes the feature easier to integrate in external blogging tools.
The post format feature was introduced to WordPress in version 3.1, when Tumblr was at its peak, and it was seen at the time as an attempt to mimic Tumblrs success. Since then, the relevancy of post formats in WordPress has slowly dwindled. There was an effort to push them forward with WordPress 3.6, as documented by Post Status, but the Post Format updates were scrapped before the version was released.