Two single.php files?

Question

I have a custom post type "people". For each person, I can enter the following custom fields: "address", "occupation" and "pictures".

In the single-people.php I display the address and the occupation. In addition, this single template contains a gallery button - when the website user clicks on it I want to takes the user to a separate page where only the pictures of the person he just looked at are displayed.

How do I achieve that? I cannot just create a second single.php file, right?

Answer 1

I'm a fan of page templates - Here's what I would do.

First create a page called something like Person Gallery, call it whatever you'd like.

Then we can create either a separate template page-person-gallery.php or open our page.php and run a conditional in our loop to test if we're viewing the Person Gallery Page:

<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>
    <?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
        <?php if($post->post_name == 'person-gallery') : /** Better to test for ID **/ ?>
            <!-- We're on the Person Gallery Page -->
        <?php else : ?>
            <!-- Run default info -->
        <?php endif; ?>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Either method you pick, we can now build a query based off what we know about about the person, which is nothing right now. We will need to build a link on your single.php that can give us a bit more information about the person. So when you create your links to the person-gallery we can pass our person ID. It'll look something like this:

<!-- Again, better getting permalink by ID -->
<a href="<?php echo get_permalink( get_page_by_path( 'person-gallery' ) ).'?person='.$post->ID ?>">View Gallery</a>

Now when somebody clicks that link, it will pass us that person ID which we can then base our query on. So let's create get our images:

<?php
    if(isset($_GET['person']) && is_numeric($_GET['person'])) {
        $pesonID = $_GET['person'];
        $attachments = get_children(
            array(
                'numberposts' => -1,
                'post_mime_type' => 'image',
                'post_parent' => $personID,
                'post_status' => 'any',
                'post_type' => 'attachment'
            )
        );

        /** Now we can display our images! **/
        $attachments = get_children(
            array(
                'numberposts' => -1,
                'post_mime_type' => 'image',
                'post_parent' => $post->ID,
                'post_status' => 'any',
                'post_type' => 'attachment'
            )
        );

        /** Now we can display our images! **/
        foreach($attachments as $imgID => $img){
            echo wp_get_attachment_image($imgID);
        }
    }
    else{
        echo "<p>No Images Found.</p>";
    }
?>

You can pass some sizes and such to wp_get_attachment_image, View The Codex to see what gets returned.

Answer 2

You might possibly use the same single-page.php. Being header,footer and conditional sidebar same and just the different middle content.

if(is_singular( 'custom_post_title' ) ){
     // do your conditional stuff
}else if(is_singular( 'custom_post_title_2' )){
     // do your conditional stuff 2 
}else{
    //do other else stuff
}