Custom posts and Taxonomies – Implementation help

Hi guys,

I have a travel blog which I write about my traveling in a specific country and post images inside the posts. I want my website to have a user friendly hierarchy.

It will be a bit complicated but please bare with me.

First, I have decided to use a permalink structure for posts like this:

%year%/%postname%.html

I did that for scalability and optimization purposes as I know that WordPress Codex recommend using a permalink that starts with a number.

I want my website categories to have a structure like this:

mydomain.com/cities/the-name-of-the-city/

I want both “/cities/” and “/name-of-the-city/” to be accessible by both users and search engines.

I am not 100% sure about that hierarchy, as I would probably want to add another deeper level like: Hotels, Attractions, etc. – under each city.

I know that WordPress support Custom posts and Taxonomies. I don’t know what is the best way to build that hierarchy and how to use both or just one of the custom post/Taxonomies in order to create the best hierarchy.

The permalink is important and I don’t want to use the /category/the-category-name structure.

Speed is also important. I Don’t want WordPress to create a structure that will stress my database too much. I guess that if I use a defined Taxonomy/Custom post structure, WordPress will not create Verbose rules for those permalinks that are created due to the use of the following Taxonomy/Custom post features.

I still don’t 100% understand how to implement those two options correctly in my website to build a good hierarchy and have friendly permalinks.

Please – I Need you advice.