Creating a dashboard menu page similar to the "Pages" page

Question

I'm looking to create a group of static pages for a "staff" category, and then have a separate menu option for them in the dashboard, similar to the "pages" option that already exists. What I'm wondering is if there's a built in wordpress functions that would speed along this development. If you have a suggestion on where to start looking, that would be great, as my current searches are stymied by countless tutorials of how to add a new page or how to duplicate a page, as opposed to duplicating the "pages" menu.

Apologies for the broad, vague nature of this post. I'm new to wordpress, and I'm still absorbing this vast knowledge base.

Answer 1

Not as vague as you might think. This is a very commonly used approach. What I would suggest you focus on is creating a custom post type. This will give you the admin menu item, categories (or any taxonomy structure you like) and many other features.

CPTs are very simple to register and modify. They are perfectly suited for storing data such as products in a store, destinations for a travel site, etc.

Full documentation for the register function ( register_post_type() ) can be found here

Answer 2

You'll want to register your own custom post type. Rather than try and get your head around how to do this properly (as referenced in other answers), I'd recommend you add this to your functions file and adjust as needed:

function custom_post_type() {

// Set UI labels for Custom Post Type
$labels = array(
    'name'                => _x( 'Staff', 'Post Type General Name' ),
    'singular_name'       => _x( 'Staff', 'Post Type Singular Name' ),
    'menu_name'           => __( 'Staff' ),
    'parent_item_colon'   => __( 'Parent Staff' ),
    'all_items'           => __( 'All Staff' ),
    'view_item'           => __( 'View Staff' ),
    'add_new_item'        => __( 'Add New Staff' ),
    'add_new'             => __( 'Add New' ),
    'edit_item'           => __( 'Edit Staff' ),
    'update_item'         => __( 'Update Staff' ),
    'search_items'        => __( 'Search Staff' ),
    'not_found'           => __( 'Not Found' ),
    'not_found_in_trash'  => __( 'Not found in Trash' ),
);

$args = array(
    'label'               => __( 'staff' ),
    'description'         => __( 'Staff List'),
    'labels'              => $labels,
    // Features this CPT supports in Post Editor
    'supports'            => array( 'title', 'author', 'revisions', 'author', 'thumbnail', 'excerpt', 'revisions', 'page-attributes'),
    // You can associate this CPT with a taxonomy or custom taxonomy. 
    'taxonomies'          => array( 'category' ),
    /* A hierarchical CPT is like Pages and can have
    * Parent and child items. A non-hierarchical CPT
    * is like Posts.
    */  
    'hierarchical'        => false,
    'public'              => true,
    'show_ui'             => true,
    'menu_icon'           => 'dashicons-businessman',
    'show_in_menu'        => true,
    'show_in_nav_menus'   => true,
    'show_in_admin_bar'   => true,
    'menu_position'       => 5,
    'can_export'          => true,
    'has_archive'         => true,
    'exclude_from_search' => false,
    'publicly_queryable'  => true,
    'capability_type'     => 'page',
);

// Registering your Custom Post Type
register_post_type( 'staff', $args );
}
add_action( 'init', 'custom_post_type', 0 );

You can then make a single-staff.php and archive-staff.php to display staff results. With the taxonomy of category seen above, it will set up categories so you can use that to create a menu item.

Answer 3

There's a great plugin for creating and editing menu items in the wp-admin. Check it out here:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/admin-menu-editor/

You can create custom menu items with that. You may also need to create a custom post type or a page with the text or content on it that you want the new menu link to load.

It's good practice to use plugins for anything that's generating content in wordpress. As apposed to coding it directly into a theme.

Hope this helps!