Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
Custom Post Types provide many benefits for plugin developers. According to Elementor, they allow WordPress developers to build more complex websites, make changes easily, and speed up project development time.
WordPress by default provides a limited number of post types and the most commonly used post types are posts and pages. Following are some other post types that WordPress offers with its standard installation –
- Attachments
- Revisions
- Navigation Menus
- Custom CSS
- Changesets
You can read more about them in detail from this Post Types support article.
By the way, based on your project’s requirements, you can always create any custom post types for it. Some of the use cases can be – displaying portfolios, testimonials, recipes, etc.
You can also design custom taxonomies in WordPress. By default, WordPress provides only Categories, Tags, and Post Formats, but you can generate new taxonomies for the same purposes as mentioned earlier.
Explore these videos for insights and tutorials on Custom Post types. This section comprises 5 modules with a combined duration of approximately 45 minutes.
| Video Content | Time |
|---|---|
| Basics of Post Types | 06:35 |
| Pt 1: Creating CPTs | 12:15 |
| Pt 2: Creating CPTs | 07:48 |
| Primer for Rewrite API & Archives | 09:17 |
| Custom Taxonomies | 8:54 |
Take a look at the following videos to learn more about Shadow/Hidden Taxonomy
| Video Content | Time |
|---|---|
| Hidden Shadow Taxonomies: Use Cases | 14:39 |
| Creating Hidden Taxonomies | 16:10 |
References
- Custom Post Types
- Taxonomies
- Utility Taxonomies
- Ultimate Guide to Custom Post Types in WordPress
- Make sense of WordPress excerpts and teasers
Coding Exercise
Consider the following scenario: you have been tasked with storing books and categorizing them by genre. Go through the register_post_type() and register_taxonomy() documentation, and register the rt-book CPT and rt-genre taxonomy with following requirements:
- Book CPT should only support title, editor, thumbnail and comments.
- Book CPT should have the public slug of the book.
- Genre taxonomy should be hierarchical.
- Genre taxonomy should have the public slug of the genre.
Ideas to Explore:
- What are the key arguments and labels used in the register_post_type() function?
- How can you make a custom post type appear in the WordPress admin menu?
- How do you add custom fields to a custom post type for additional functionality?
- How are taxonomies different from categories and tags?
- What are custom taxonomies, and when would you create one?
- How do you register a custom taxonomy in WordPress?
- What are the key arguments for the register_taxonomy() function?
- How can you associate a custom taxonomy with a custom post type?
- How can you use plugins to create and manage custom post types and taxonomies without coding?