Advice on using Custom Post Types

Question

I have 8 custom post types for a lottery website I am currently working, one custom post type for each game that is in the lottery, but I am now wondering if this is the best way to go about this, would I be better off do you think in creating 1 custom post type called draw results, and having all the games results in this one custom post type, and then have categories to select for which game the results apply to, or should I stick with the 8 custom post types, and list them under a game information page in my menu as this is how I currently have it setup.

Some games have 5 numbers then the bonus number, others have 6 numbers and the bonus, others have 2 bonus numbers, others have no bonus numbers, but I was just putting these into the wysiwyg editor not using custom fields, am not sure what to use as the title for each post also am thinking from an SEO point of view.

Some games are televised, some arent so there will be custom things like presenter, and celebrity guest presenter, aswell as location in some rare cases, its not a big issue for these to be on all draw games even those that aren't televised. This I presume would use the custom meta fields.

There could potentially be 8 categories 1 for each game, as I was intending to have a blog section on the site as to why I thought about using custom post types to keep the draw results seperate from the blog.

The custom post types wouldn't be hierarchical, there could be 2 categories assign to each draw result one which would be the game it is for, and another which would be simply Draw Results perhaps?

The categories and custom post types would be :-

• Lotto
• Lotto Plus 5
• EuroMillions
• Thunderball
• Lotto HotPicks
• Daily Play
• Dream Number
• Lotto Extra

I'm in two minds as to what the best way would be, am also trying to think of this from an SEO point of view aswell.

Answer 1

One possible solution:

• Custom Post Type draw-results, where each post is a contest/game result
• Custom Taxonomy contest (or game), where each term is a different contest/game
• When you create a draw-results post, taxonomize it using the appropriate contest (or game) term.

EDIT

From your updated question:

Some games are televised, some arent so there will be custom things like presenter, and celebrity guest presenter, aswell as location in some rare cases, its not a big issue for these to be on all draw games even those that aren't televised. This I presume would use the custom meta fields.

Exactly. Things like "presenter", "celebrity guest presenter", and "location" are unique to a given post, and are well-suited to custom post meta.

Especially since you also want to have a "normal" blog, I would definitely go with the CPT route for your lottery results. Though, you could simply exclude the lottery-results category/categories from your normal blog feed.

Answer 2

Depends I guess from how much difference there's between games in the lottery. Ie, if you need to use specific custom meta fields for each game, it would be more practical organizing them with different post types. Another thing would be if they require different taxonomies or not, if certain games should have a hierarchical taxonomy and others not, etc. If the different games don't change much (suppose they consist only in drawn numbers), and there wouldn't be much difference in their taxonomies, then you could just create a single post type for all the games and use a taxonomy to differentiate them.

Perhaps you could provide more detailed info for a more precise opinion on your matter.

[AFTER YOU HAVE EDITED YOUR ORIGINAL QUESTION]:

create one custom post type and one taxonomy to differentiate games

add custom meta fields to specify details about certain games - then do something on the frontend to display games differently filtering taxonomies and custom fields

as for the SEO, you should be fine, since you can define slugs for everything; use microformats for your frontend if possible, optimize usual things as you would do in any blog (chaching, permalinks...) and that should do it