Posts vs Pages and categories

Question

I am creating a largely static site for the collections/archives office of a library. Since I am expecting most content to be created once and slowly appended or modified over time, instead of regular posts, my first inclination is to make everything a page.

On the other hand, I have pages/posts that exist in two or 3 categories that I would really love to be able to generate listings of and I cannot think of a good way to do this except by using categories and posts. I know that there is a plugin allowing you tag pages with categories, but get_posts does not always work when I do this.

Is the fact that I have content that needs multiple categories and have overlaps with each other more important than the fact that this content should largely be static?

I have an collection that is made up of sites dedicated to specific topics. If I made each of those mini sites a post type, I could then make the main page loop through those posts to create entries on the collections main page and now that as long as they were tagged properly, items would show up there.

So, is static content the only determiner of whether something is a page or a post?

Answer 1

the way WordPress stores pages in the database is the same as it stores posts, so it makes no difference if the content is created as pages or posts (static or not).

And if most of the content is static you can always use a caching plugin to serve that content as static.

Answer 2

Since you're not going to use the site as a blog and public access will not be allowed, it'll make not much difference whether you use pages or posts.

Still, posts navigation would be easier, and you can tag each post so that finding information can be easier.