Product attributes “database”

  • Hey guess,

    I am currently in the process of creating a board game blog. I have worked with WordPress for ages, I know how to create content with it, but I do not know how to write a single line of code, so in this regard I am pretty much a newbie.

    What I want to do: I want to create category pages for a couple of popular board games and add important attributes to them, like player count, playing time and so on to.

    Those attributes should be displayed on the product/category page and on other pages in an info box.

    The questions for me at this point are:

    • Does it make sense to use categories as product pages? I cannot think of a better way to write posts and attach them to a certain game.
    • Is there an easy way to do what I want? I read a bit about custom fields and thought they might be a way, but as I said I am not a developer and the plugins for that all sounded a lot like overkill.

    Best wishes
    Johannes

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata). Reason: moved from developing to everything else
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    I don’t see a solution that does not involve at least some custom coding. That shouldn’t discourage you. You only need to learn what’s needed to accomplish your goal. Learning to be a competent coder is not required. You have 4 choices for how to relate posts to a game. A taxonomy like categories. Custom fields. A custom post type. A custom database schema. Any of these could work, but the last 2 are likely overkill. A custom field only relates to its post and not anything else, so it’s not a good choice. That leaves us with a taxonomy.

    You could create a custom taxonomy if categories already have another use. A taxonomy could serve multiple purposes, so using categories is probably fine. All taxonomy terms have related meta data that coders can use to meet their needs. There is no UI by default for utilizing term meta, it must be coded. I would hope there are plugins that make utilization of term meta easier without needing to code your own.

    You can store in term meta all related game stats for each game’s term. That plugin I imagine might even have shortcodes to allow you to output stats within post or page content. Normally, we’d alter related theme templates to get category terms for the current post. Then get the stats related to the term so determined and output them from the theme template.

    Thread Starter sonnendieb

    (@sonnendieb)

    Thanks a lot for your ideas. That sound like sth I could really manage with some work.
    At the moment, I’m also looking at the SiteOrigin Custom Post Type Builder and and trying to find out out if that widget can help me

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    That could be a way to store game attributes. You still need to relate those post types to blog posts somehow. You could use a custom field for that. Then the widget needs to somehow know what the current blog post’s field value is in order to display the right attributes.

    You will likely need a hybrid existing plugin/custom code solution to accomplish this. The more you can use plugins to do certain aspects, the less coding required, but something has to tie all these elements together.

    Thread Starter sonnendieb

    (@sonnendieb)

    I also found the plugin Meta Box, that might be a really good solution for my purposes. Or just use some table plugin. But I dont know if there is one that lets me output the contents of certain cells without any coding.

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