What Can I do To Achieve this Effect: WIP -> Portfolio

Question

Suppose for projects, I will have a bunch of WIP (category) posts. Then once it's done I will create a Portfolio post for it. I will want to link this Portfolio post with the WIP (similar to related posts).

Then I will also want WIP posts of the project to be excluded from my main WIP listing. How can I achieve this effect?

In WIP page, I want a listing like

• Project 1
• Project 2
• Project 3

Showing only all the incomplete projects. Perhaps, I can have a "discontinued" listing too, but separate.

Each link will go to the page showing all (WIP) blog posts of a project. How can I achieve this? I am thinking WIP will be a category, do I put the project as a tag? I will want to associate each project with a thumbnail & description too.

Since I am a developer I could code something, but I am new to WordPress so will require guidance.

Answer 1

The way i would go about it is create a custom post type named "porjects" and use it to post my projects, that way you can easily

• exclude these posts from the rest of your post.
• associate thumbnails.
• associate description.
• associate ant custom field you want.
• create sub/child posts to each project.
• tag with incomplete or discontinued for easy querying and listing.

It just seems alot easier that way, so your best bet is to start of with a custom post type. Now if registering a custom post type looks like too much for you, you can start of with one of the many "custom post type UI" plugins available.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

As @Bainternet stated above, the best way to get the functionality you need is through custom post types. By default, these posts will be separate from your main loop and will allow you to customize at the single, archive, and loop levels for this custom content, at the bare minimum.Thumbnails and descriptions are effortlessly possible in this structure.

Your requirement for 'incomplete projects' is better handled as a tag, as this is a conditional state for the post. However, you are asking to link back to a category of projects, so if multiple projects will be long-standing as 'incomplete', different categories of projects may make sense to 'silo' complete projects from incomplete projects.

For guidance, please see http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types#Custom_Types to get started with coding custom post types. This is the official Codex documentation on this topic and has been immensely useful for me as 'boilerplate' in the past. If you are not comfortable editing functions.php in your theme, this plugin is fairly simple to pick up and use for this purpose. Good luck!