Entry (Statamic)

In Statamic, an entry is a single content record within a collection. If a collection is "Blog Posts," then each individual post is an entry. If the collection is "Team Members," each person is an entry. The entry holds the actual content — field values, the title, the slug, publication date, and any other data defined in the collection’s blueprint.

The closest WordPress equivalents are posts and pages, or records in a Custom Post Type. An entry is what you’re creating when you click "New Entry" in the Control Panel, and it’s what you’re querying when you pull content into a template.

How Entries Are Stored

In Statamic’s default flat-file CMS mode, each entry is a Markdown file on disk. The file contains YAML front matter (the structured field data) and an optional Markdown body. The filename includes a date and the slug: 2024-03-15.my-post-title.md. This means your content lives in version-controlled files rather than a database, which has implications for deployment, editing workflows, and backup strategies.

In Statamic’s database mode (available when you need it for larger sites or team-based editing), entries are stored in a relational database instead, but the conceptual model is the same. See What’s the difference between Statamic’s flat-file and database modes? for a comparison.

Entries vs. WordPress Posts

The structural differences between Statamic entries and WordPress posts reflect deeper architectural choices. WordPress stores everything in the wp_posts table, with custom field data in wp_postmeta. A "post" and a "page" are both rows in the same table, distinguished by a post_type column. A Custom Post Type record is also a row in wp_posts.

Statamic separates collections into distinct directories on disk, and entries within each collection share a blueprint. This means a "Team Member" entry and a "Blog Post" entry don’t share a table or data structure — they’re in separate directories with entirely separate field configurations. It’s a cleaner separation of content types that becomes more apparent when you’re managing a site with several distinct content types.

When migrating from WordPress, each post type maps to a collection, and each record in that post type becomes an entry in that collection. Field values from ACF or other meta sources map to the fields defined in the entry’s blueprint. See content modeling for more on how to plan that mapping.