Template for all categories of a custom post type?

Question

Hello ladies and gents!

I'm hoping you can help me with this one.. if it's each possible. I (ideally) need a general template for the categories of a custom post type.

Custom post type: Listings (type-listings) Listing's categories(cat-listings): Lease (lease) & Sale (sale)

So when I visit http://www.domain.com/listings/cat-listings/lease I get a 404 (does this mean that this page is not possible to have? or because I am missing a template. I suspect the former as I know wordpress has default ones to fallback on.) when I'd like to have a page that I can alter... In this page I want to show all of the posts in the lease category, and have the user be able to navigate to the similar sale page with the sale posts.

Now I know I could create a page for each and have them have their custom template pages but the issue I have with this is if my client ever wants to add another category a page and page template has to be created.

Another solution is to have an toggle/tab system where I just create a listings page and have a toggle/tab between the categories. My problem with this is I don't know how many listings there will be and therefore pagination should work. I don't think I could have a toggle/tab and pagination.

Thanks for your help!

I've tried the following and had no luck; cat-listings.php type-listings.php archive-type-listings.php archive-type-listings-cat-listings.php category.php category-type-listings.php category-cat-listings.php category-type-listings-cat-listings.php taxonomy-type-listings.php taxonomy-cat-listings.php taxonomy-type-listings-cat-listings.php

I found this post which sounds like what I need but as you can see from the above list I've tried it without luck. Same template for all the terms of a taxonomy

Here is how I register my custom post type:

    register_post_type('type-listings', array(
    'labels' => array(
    'name' => _x('Our Listings', 'Titles', theme_domain()),
    'singular_name' => _x('Listing', 'Titles', theme_domain()),
    'menu_name' => _x('Our Listings', 'Titles', theme_domain()),
    ),
    'public' => false,
    'publicly_queryable' => true,
    'show_ui' => true,
    'show_in_menu' => true,
    'query_var' => true,
    'rewrite' => array('slug' => _x('listings', 'URL Slug', theme_domain()), 'with_front' => false, 'page' => false),
    'capability_type' => 'page',
    'has_archive' => true,
    'hierarchical' => false,
    'menu_position' => 21,
    'menu_icon' => 'dashicons-admin-home',
    'supports' => array('title', 'custom-fields', 'revisions'),
    ));
    $catProjectsArgs = array(
    'label' => __('Availability', theme_domain()),
    'sort' => true,
    'show_ui' => true,
    'show_admin_column' => true,
    'hierarchical' => true,
    'update_count_callback' => '_update_post_term_count',
    'query_var' => true,
    'args' => array('orderby' => 'term_order'),
    );
    register_taxonomy('cat-listings', array('type-listings'), $catProjectsArgs);

Answer 1

The name you are using for taxonomy isn't allowed. register_post_type() $taxonomy parameter says

$taxonomy

(string) (required) The name of the taxonomy. Name should only contain lowercase letters and the underscore character, and not be more than 32 characters long (database structure restriction).

Default: None

So, you need to change the name cat-listings to something else( I will assume cat_listings for the rest of the answer)

Now let's visit your questions one by one.

1. So when I visit http://www.domain.com/listings/cat_listings/lease I get a 404 (does this mean that this page is not possible to have? or because I am missing a template.

It's possible to have Permalink structure like that. If you create a term named lease under taxonomy cat_listings, the default url structure will be

http://www.domain.com/cat_listings/lease

If you want to add a segment named listings before that, you have to pass rewrite arguments like this

$catProjectsArgs = array(
    'label' => __('Availability', theme_domain()),
    'sort' => true,
    'show_ui' => true,
    'show_admin_column' => true,
    'hierarchical' => true,
    'update_count_callback' => '_update_post_term_count',
    'query_var' => true,
    'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'listings' )
);

By the way, there is no parameter named args, I've removed that.

2. Now I know I could create a page for each and have them have their custom template pages but the issue I have with this is if my client ever wants to add another category a page and page template has to be created.

It should be pretty clear which template file you have to use, if you look at the template hierarchy image. Here's a cropped version just for custom taxonomy

If you want to apply a single template for all terms under cat_listings, just create template file taxonomy-cat_listings.php. If you want to create separate template file for one of the terms that you add later, say lease, you need to create template file taxonomy-cat_listings-lease.php and so on.