Advice for sub-directory education portal, avoid going multi-site

Hmm, I mean…if you didn’t mention avoiding multisite, I would say that’s the most straightforward solution. From both a development and operation standpoint.

For example, maybe you want to hire a content manager for *just* the medical section one day, you wouldn’t want to give them access to every other section too. Not sure how you plan on running it, just a thought to consider.

Assuming you want to totally silo off content from different sections, I’d probably use a custom post type for each…not categories. This will make things more flexible later on, and allow you to use custom taxonomies for specific sections (i.e. maybe you want to taxonomize “medical” section posts by “drug name” or something).

As for different menus, you could register a menu location for each section, then use conditional tags to output the right one on specific sections.

You could also use custom post type archive templates to set up different “homepages” for each.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Leland Fiegel.

Leland,
I Appreciate your reply. Well I know Multi-site is an obvious way, I still wanted to avoid the complexity if it can be.

Yes, I may need different author teams posting to different sub-sections isolated from each other.

My experience is optimizing servers and I’m a Server Admin, Not knowing WP really deeply, I’m not familiar with “Custom Post Types” or “Taxonomies” to efficiently section-ize the site.

my main doubts are how do I setup 1) a Homepage & 2) a Menu for each custom post type

In the ocean of WP tutorials on the internet, can you point me to some good resources to quickly understand things faster and better?

Appreciate your advice…!

I think you may be misjudging the complexity of multisite over non-multisite. Sure, it’s a little different…but not by much. Any server admin issues would be largely the same. In any case, you might want to look into managed WordPress hosting so you don’t have to worry about that sort of stuff.

I think it would be the best long-term decision to set up with multisite to begin with. And while the initial setup might be a bit more complicated, it will save you from much more complication later on down the road.

On multisite, you could share the same theme between the different sites. Then you could use homepages and menus like you normally would, without custom coding. That would squash your two main doubts right off the bat.

For resources, right here on www.ads-software.com is usually the best bet.

For setting a homepage (how it looks is very theme-dependent): https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page

For creating a network: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Create_A_Network

And even though you may not need these if going the multsite route, reading up on CPTs and taxonomies would be good to know as well:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Post_Types
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Taxonomies

Leland,

I will be managing my WordPress on my own… I manage and mantain 150+ WP portals on my self managed (highly optimized) servers. That is my primary forte!

Anyways, Thanks for the pointers… I managed to install CPT UI and got the URL Structure working as desired. Was a peace of cake actually (minus the reading and research part).

Now I’m only struggling how to assign different “Menu” specific to its respective Custom Post type’s home (archive) page.

I installed this plugin Page Specific Menu Items, created 4 Menus and using this plugin assigned them in this order

Home-Menu (Main Menu) assigned to site’s default home page

bschool-Menu assigned to Custom post type bschool
engg-Menu assigned to Custom post type engg
jobs-Menu assigned to Custom post type jobs
Medical-Menu assigned to Custom post type medical

But it doesn’t seem to work. the Readme for the plugin says something the problem can be if the theme overides ‘hide_this_item’ but I’m not sure.

Any tips ??

Thanks