Creating a archive for taxonomy terms, not the term results

Question

So I am attempting to build the first page in my navigation hierarchy to choose product categories.

I have a custom taxonomy called collections. I would like to create a page that loops through all terms in the collections taxonomy and displays the Term +link and description. Just about everything I have found besides the code below is creating a list of post from a particular taxonomy. That is not what I want yet. I want a master page that has each taxonomy term with a description that then links to the post that corresponds to that term.

For example if my taxonomy was transportation, terms may be car, boat, plane which would have a description explaining what a car boat or plane is. Then each term would link to a list of specific cars or whatnot.

I created a file called taxonomy-collections.php and put the following code in. But it is not doing the trick, can anyone suggest a solution to this problem?

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();

$terms = get_terms( 'collections' );

echo '<ul>';

foreach ( $terms as $term ) {

// The $term is an object, so we don't need to specify the $taxonomy.
$term_link = get_term_link( $term );

// If there was an error, continue to the next term.
if ( is_wp_error( $term_link ) ) {
    continue;
}

// We successfully got a link. Print it out.
echo '<li><a href="' . esc_url( $term_link ) . '">' . $term->name . '</a></li>';
echo  term_description($post->ID,$term);

}

echo '</ul>';

?>

<?php endwhile; else : ?>
 <p><?php _e( 'Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.' ); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

This is almost straight from the codex, so I'm guessing I am missing something.

currently the code has each term displayed as a list, but I do want to change it to a grid format if someone could help with that too.

So each term and description will be wrapped in a div and right aligned with the next.

Answer 1

You might want to check out this post, as your post is linked to that question. That should explain most of your question.

As for your code, move that outside the the loop. You were nearly there with your code. Check out get_terms in the codex to see which objects you can use that is returned by the function. You can use $term->description instead of term_description($post->ID,$term); to return the term' description. Modify your code to

$terms = get_terms( 'collections' );

echo '<ul>';

foreach ( $terms as $term ) {

// The $term is an object, so we don't need to specify the $taxonomy.
$term_link = get_term_link( $term );

// If there was an error, continue to the next term.
if ( is_wp_error( $term_link ) ) {
    continue;
}

// We successfully got a link. Print it out.
echo '<li><a href="' . esc_url( $term_link ) . '">' . $term->name . '</a></li>';
echo  $term->description; // This will return the description of the term

}

echo '</ul>';