Custom Posts Types as Custom Fields

Question

I have three Custom Post Types: Book, Volume and Chapter where one Book can contain many Volumes and one Volume can contain many Chapters.

I want to do something like this:

1. The user access "Books"

2. The user select a book for editing and, inside that page, on the meta box, he can add/edit just the volumes relating to that book

3. The user select a volume for editing and, inside that page, on the meta box, he can add/edit just the chapters relating to that volume

4. The user finally select a chapter to edit

I initially thought of putting an iframe inside the meta box area on the post types using the src attribute as edit.php?post_type=post_type with some filters on its query string, to list just the post type related to the respective page.

What would be best in that situation?

Is that a pattern on WordPress to work with situations like that, where Custom Post Types needs to be Custom Fields of another Custom Post Type, i.e. one to many entity relationship?

Answer 1

Just using hierarchical post types is completely valid. You can do nearly everything with that and probably won't need to go beyond that.

If you really need n/n relationships (which I doubt from your description), take a look at the Posts2Posts plugin.

Answer 2

why don't you use Book as Custom post type and Volume and Chapter as Custom Taxonomy?

or

If you want to use only Custom Post Type. Please use [Advanced Custom Fields][1]

[1]: http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/ plugin.

With that plugin you can do many things. and it has very good documentation.

Answer 3

I agree with @Kaung Ko's answer - I just finished a project using Custom Post Type and Custom Taxonomies. Very similar to yours but for Wine Reviews. Also used the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for further customization.

@João Paulin - do you have a plugin installed for that custom Admin style (black left column) in the screeshots? That looks much better than native Wordpress.