Best Approach? CPTs, Taxonomies Plugins

  • I am currently developing a site and trying to figure out the best approach for what seems like a simple thing but is quite complicated with some of the restraints of WordPress.

    Essentially I have a section of a site, we’ll call it ‘Programs’. This is a top level page. Living in this section are both normal pages and program pages. Each program can be reached through three different ‘streams’: Activity Type, Age Group, and Venue.

    Each program can contain more than one age group and venue.

    Using CPTs and custom taxonomies I can create the program pages and have them cross reference each other perfectly (clicking on ‘Children’ brings up any program tagged for children; clicking on ‘Tennis’ brings up any program tagged with tennis).

    My problem occurs in the navigation. Since the CPT isn’t a child page of the top level page ‘Programs’, things go a little wacky.

    I’ve also attempted going the Advanced Custom Fields route, but the cross referencing doesn’t work.

    I’ve thought about going the Pods route, but waiting for 2.0 has taken 6+ months and I’m probably not going to wait much longer (I expect further delays).

    I’m considering firing up an eCommerce solution like WooCommerce and treating each program like a product and simply not having the ability to purchase anything.

    If anyone has any suggestions I am totally open to hearing it!

    Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you need any clarifications please let me know!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • I could probably offer a suggestion, but I am not sure what you mean by problems with the navigation. Do you mean creating a navigational menu (like at the top of a page where it says “Home, About, Contact, Page 1, etc.) or are you trying to build sort of like a sitemap/directory page of all the different taxonomies? If you could clarify – chances are it is something pretty simple to fix.

    Thread Starter TheDoc

    (@thedoc)

    By ‘problems with the navigation’ I mean… the main dropdown navigation, breadcrumbs and the section navigation that will be in the sidebar.

    Are you using WordPress custom menus?

    This explains custom menus if you are not already using them:
    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/wp_nav_menu

    To get your CPTs to show up there, just make sure you have this in the functions file where you are registering them:
    ‘show_in_nav_menus’ => true,

    You can also always link to any page on your site directly also using custom nav menus. You can use the custom menu widgets to control what appears in the sidebar as well.

    For the breadcrumbs…I would probably do something like this tutorial:
    https://tkdigitaldesign.com/wordpress/how-to-write-a-breadcrumb-function-for-wordpress/

    And then just adjust as necessary for the taxonomies/custom post types. Some breadcrumb plugins support custom post types but I am not sure which ones off the top of my head.

    Good luck, hopefully that will help a little.

    Thread Starter TheDoc

    (@thedoc)

    Yea, I’m using Custom Menus for the main navigation, but I don’t want to have the client have to manage each section’s navigation as well (about 5-6 sections).

    The problem, in essence, is that the CPTs are sort of taken out of the regular flow of the site’s page structure.

    Thanks for the suggestions.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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