Creating Sublists from a Main List – how?

  • I am creating a long list of books on Amazon that are of specific interest to those who read my blog. There are several topics within that grouping and I want to make topic-specific lists also from the authors page. The main list is arranged by author such that an author may have written several books but not all are on the same topic, Apples, Bananas and Spinach, and they are all under his name.

    One goal of the authors page is for the reader to see the other books by the same author which is not always easy to do on Amazon itself. In my own searching, sometimes it’s much later I find an additional book by a writer when I thought I already had a complete list.

    I want to create topic lists from that main list so, for instance, instead of looking for all the books on Apples by scanning the entire list, he goes over to the Apples list and there are all the Apple books. Makes his life simple. Besides, sometimes it’s not evident from a title alone which list or lists it should go onto, making it very easy for him to miss the one that would be right one for him.

    The only way I can think of doing that right now is to go down the author list and copy and paste each Apple item into the Apple list. Then go back through the list again to do the same for Bananas, again for Spinach. Very tedious and time-consuming!

    I tried doing something with hashtags but that doesn’t work because coding each item with the tag gets the person back to the main page at the top.

    If I could code each item with the correct list topic then have it create that list …. that’s ideal. Then when new items are added, as it goes onto the authors list, the little code adds it to the appropriate topic list or lists. It could create a static list, or be dynamic when the reader requests. Either way, I’m happy.

    Perhaps it could work this way. A little code on each book in the main page. Then when the reader wants everything on Apples, he goes to that page and dynamically the list is created. That way, anything new is included. The coding could wrap around the entire title so that it copies over. Just thinking how it could work. I’m not a programmer by any means but do have long experience as a word processor and made many macros.

    The reader doing a search of the main page on keywords won’t do it either because many times titles do not contain the topic word. “Three Superfoods that Give You Energy” – if that was a title, who knows that it has a large section on Spinach? And would be missed with a word search.

    This will be a growing area as new books come out or more topics are of interest.

    Is there a plugin or even a method that you can suggest? It’s taken dozens of hours to get this far and there are still many more yet to come for the main page alone.

    I look forward to any help or suggestions and thank you in advance.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    You were so close with hash tags! You should simply use the built in tag taxonomy. There’s no hash in front of WP tags, but they largely work the same way. You could alternately use the category taxonomy instead, the UI is a little different. Categories can be hierarchical, tags cannot.

    You can produce a list of tags from template code with wp_list_categories(['taxonomy'=>'post_tag',]);
    Clicking any tag leads to a list of posts with those tags. If the books are a custom post type, the query needs to be fiddled with to get books instead of posts. It may be better to have a custom taxonomy to go with the book custom post type so the queries work properly without fiddling. It can be just like tags, just call it something else like “topic” or similar.

    Please don’t use URL shorteners in topic links. People like to know where they’re going. Topic links are not crawled by search bots so there is little reason to use URL shorteners.

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