I’m setting up a “Design Show Winners” section for a design organization that runs it’s site off WordPress. For ease of use, I’d like it to be a custom post type of “Design Show Winners” with non-hierarchical taxonomies of “Entry Year”, “Entry Category”, “Designer or Firm”, and then a couple other pieces of custom field meta data.
The part I’m struggling with is that each year will have 3 distinctly different pages: a landing page, list of winners, and a winner detail page. We will want to add new ones every year without getting rid of or modifying the old ones. Each year, about 70 or so winning pieces will be added, you can see how selecting a parent page in a drop-down with several hundred options would be unwieldy. That’s why I’d like to keep the year as a taxonomy rather than a hierarchical post type.
On top of that, we want to have these other taxonomies (Entry Category, Designer or Firm) be search-able cross-year (as in all years, or just searching by taxonomy) using a templates that match the default style of their site.
Also, the people who would adding the new sites are not that technical beyond HTML and CSS, so if there is a way we could do this with a template page, that would be ideal. I saw this post mention creating custom template redirects. Could I possibly use something like that to accomplish my goal? If so, how.
I know this isn’t exactly your run of the mill WordPress issue, so if somebody could point me in the right direction on this issue, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
From your description, it seems like you would need 2 custom post types, one for the list of winners page and one for the individual winners.
On the list of winners page type you can select which taxonomies you want to show (2009, Category). Then you can create a template that takes those taxonomy values and uses them to create a custom loop to display those Winners with the specific taxonomy values.
On the winners custom post type you have the taxonomies you’ve already listed and you create a template that will be used for all the winners.
For the landing page, depending on how you want it done you could just create page template or do something more complicated like have links automatically generate for you to each Year page that you created.
This way each year you create a listing page and select the categories you want it to show through the admin so it will be easy for non technical people to create lists of winners by year and cateogry.
Hope that helps
Paul Sheldrake is right, but i think you only need one post type
Post type – participant
creating listing pages is easy, you just make a regular WP page and a template with the custom wp_query code