I’m working on a new site for a charity. They publish a printed magazine & we would like the website to always reflect the current issue of the magazine.
So far I have a front page (home page) with excerpts from 3 most recent lead articles (wp posts). For layout purposes, the articles are categorized as frontpage-left, frontpage-right-top & frontpage-right-bottom. We also have a sidebar with a menu to all the articles in the current issue (posts list).
Now looking for advice on the best way to store old/previous “issues” of the website as a complete, working archive so visitors can view them?
I’d say go with categories: it seems your categories are already being used for ‘back-end’ purposes, so I’d imagine they’re already hidden from the front-end users.
Otherwise, go for a custom taxonomy (something like ‘issue’ taxonomy perhaps), which is a bit more work, but gives you a lot more control. Take a look at the register_taxonomy function as a starting point.
If you want to go all the way, you could create a widget for the front-end which would list all those custom taxonomy terms (i.e. issues) so that users could visit the old issues with one click.
It’s tough to consider all possible scenarios, but assuming the ‘issue’ web pages are created by the
index.phpfile of your theme, when visiting something like ‘example.com/category/issue_1’ (in case you’re using native categories) or ‘example.com/issue/1’ (if using a custom taxonomy) WP would automatically filter only those articles belonging to issue 1, andindex.phpwould process and display only those articles. (Note that this also assumes that all taxonomies are correctly assigned, and that you have pretty permalinks, etc. But you get the idea.) If this is not the way your theme is structured, you should really consider it: it’s only one file to maintain, and it let’s WP’s native query functionality do the rest.I see no need for a more sophisticated or customized approach than the two options above. WordPress’ native functionality is pretty robust as it is. How to create the theme which displays the information that’s been organized in a certain way is a much more open-ended discussion, though.
Important to realise you don’t need to “store” the previous issues in a separate location to have them available as old/previous issues. As each issue is just a wp post you can present your posts in different locations based on the relevant criteria – in this case current & previous.
You could set up [previous] as a post tag (I don’t see the need for the slightly increased complexity of categories or custom taxonomy) and then use this tag to filter your posts. There are plenty of plugins available to do that easily on individual WordPress pages.