Taxonomy structure help

Question

I have been struggling with Taxonomies and Post Types for a while and could really use help understanding what would be the best implementation for my situation.

Have a look here: http://shaulzofef.com/netivyah/resources/audio-lessons/

I setup a few post types; Books, Magazines, Articles and Audiolessons. I setup a few Taxonomies: Language, Author, Teacher. Teacher is associated to one post type only, Audiolessons, but Language is associated to all post types. I made a submenu on the audio page that has English, Hebrew and Russian at parent level and underneath a list of teachers in each language.

I have a few problems: 1 - Some teachers teach in more than one language, so if I click on Joseph under English how will I make it list only the posts with taxonomy term Joseph AND taxonomy term English? 2 - When I click on English it lists the English Audiolessons AND other posts associated with taxonomy term English (articles, books and so on). How would I list only the Audiolessons?

I realize I can code a Wordpress query for posts related to post type and taxonomy, however that will require a file for each combination..

I could create separate taxonomies for each post type, 'Audio-Language' for instance, then I could easily list them, but that doesn't seem right.. then what if I do want an option to list all English resources together. Should I create hierarchical taxonomies instead?.. I'm getting confused. Any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to filter your audio lessons post archive you could borrow from the article I linked you to and add a custom rewrite rule:

function wpa_add_rewrite_rules() {
    global $wp_rewrite;

    $new_rules = array(
        'audio-lessons/language/(.+)/?$' => 'index.php?post_type=audio-lesson&language=' . $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1)
    );
    $wp_rewrite->rules = $new_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;
}
add_action( 'generate_rewrite_rules', 'wpa_add_rewrite_rules' );

After re-saving your permalinks, something like http://example.com/audio-lessons/language/english would show all the English audio lessons.

However, I am not sure the URL you provided is a post type archive and not a custom page template.

If it is a page template and you are running multiple Wp_Query() calls you could register a new query variable and build your tax_query up from that.

function wpa_add_new_query_vars($vars) {   
    $vars[] = 'language'; // name of variable you want to add       
    return $vars;
}
add_filter( 'query_vars', 'wpa_add_new_query_vars', 10, 1 );

You may not even need this part as I think the query var is registered when you register the taxonomy.

Then you could query posts like so:

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'audio-lesson'
);

if( $lang = get_query_var( 'language' ) ){
    $args['tax_query'] = array( array( 
            'taxonomy' => 'language',
            'field' => 'slug',
            'terms' => '$lang'
        ));
}

$my_posts = new WP_Query( $args );

I can't really test this and the tax_query can sometimes trip me up with its array of arrays so I'm not 100% sure it will work.

Then anywhere you wanted to make a link to a specific language section you could use add_query_arg()