The Item Usage defines the internal function of an Item Type.

For example:

• "Blog Post", "Post with custom fields" and "Manual Page" may be 3 Item-Types that all have the usage of "In content flow Post".
• "About page" and "Price Plan" may be 2 Item-Types that both have the usage of "Standalone page".

Each Item-Type can be assigned 1 specific Usage:

Item usage can be categorized into 3 basic groups:

In content flow

These are items that will appear in the flow of posts/news and normally comprise the bulk of your collection content.

• Post: typical examples include: blog posts, recipes, manual pages, forum topics, photo albums, podcast episodes. Items of this usage will appear in the "Posts" sub-tab when browsing a collection in the back-office.

Out of content flow

These are items that will not appear in the flow of items. These are independent pieces of content, usually used as building blocks of your site. This is divided into 3 types:

• Standalone pages / Content Pages: These are single page content of information. Typical examples would be: Contact page, About page, Privacy policy, Terms of Use, etc. Items of this usage will appear in the "Pages" sub-tab when browsing a collection in the back-office.
• Widget Pages: these pages are constructed with widgets rather than a large block of text. TODO More doc…
• Content Blocks: These are pieces of content that can be included in a lot of places in the site typically with the use of Content Block Widget. Items of this usage will appear in the "Content Block" sub-tab when browsing a collection in the back-office.
• Special pages: these items contain special content that can only be displayed via the use of certain widgets such as the Universal Item List Widget. Some examples of these are Sidebar Links or Advertisements. Items of this usage will appear in the "Special" sub-tab when browsing a collection in the back-office.

Intros

Intro Items are not displayed in the regular flow of items either. Instead, depending on what you are looking at (the home page, a category, a tag page…) b2evolution will automatically select one intro item and display it on top of the regular list of items. In many skins, the intro will be displayed with a slightly different style from a regular item. See Intro and Featured Items.

There are several intro usages. Depending on the exact intro usage, an intro item will qualify for display on a specific page or not (some can display only on the main page, some can display only on a category page, etc.). If in the end there are several intro items of the same type that are qualified to be displayed on the same page, the most "recent" one will win (depending on collection sort order). As a general rule, the intro item that comes first based on the current order will be the one that is displayed.

The 6 intro usages are:

• Intro-Front: this intro item will be shown on the special front page if the current collection is configured to show such a Special Front Page.
• Intro-Main: this intro item will be shown on the homepage (unless there’s a more "recent" Intro-All item). It doesn’t matter which category this is in.
• Intro-Cat: this intro item will be shown on your category (or sub-category) pages, depending on which categories you have selected for this intro item. (This is, unless there’s a more "recent" Intro-All item)
• Intro-Tag: this intro item will be shown on your tag pages, depending on which tags you have assigned to this intro item. (This is, unless there’s a more "recent" Intro-All item)
• Intro-Sub: this intro item will be shown on the other "sub" pages of your collection. This means: everything but the home page, category pages and tag pages. For example, it may appear on pages 2, 3, 4 etc. It may also appear on pages filtered by author. (This is, unless there’s a more "recent" Intro-All item). This is designed to be a "filler" when Intro-All is not appropriate. In most cases we recommend to use Intro-All.
• Intro-All: this is designed to be used as a fallback intro for all pages that have no other Intro item. To ensure that it works properly, make sure its publication date is older than your other Intro-* items (or better said: this item should be last in order in your current collection sorting order).

Items of this usage will appear in the "Intros" sub-tab when browsing a collection in the back-office