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I've recently taken on a project from a client of mine, after a lot of persuasion I've managed to finally get the website under some kind of CMS. I'm pretty new to Wordpress I've come from an ExpressionEngine background and fancied trying something new for a change, so excuse the lack of knowledge (I'm trying my best! :D).

Now The issue I'm currently facing is that they have very specific directions regarding how they want their content displayed on their website and more importantly how they would like to manage it. They are a travel agent I'm currently putting together the resort directory that will display all of the resorts they offer.

In regards to the current structure of the directory it will be made up of 4 different sections. To give you a better understanding of how I want things to work take a look at this hierarchy below, (I've used turkey as an example, these would need to be dynamic):

  • /destinations/
    This will be our destinations page that will list all of the countries they currently offer. I imagine this to be a static page with some content about the countries on offer with a list of the countries below (These will be our parent taxonomies).

  • /destinations/turkey/
    This will be our parent taxonomy. This page will also have to have the ability to add some static content to insert information about the country and its locations. Below this will be a second list, these will be the different areas of turkey (These will be children of the parent taxonomies).

  • /destinations/turkey/belek/
    This will be our child taxonomy, This page will again need to have the ability to add some static content. It will also include our list of resorts that my client offers within this location (These will be our entries/posts).

  • /destinations/turkey/belek/resort-name
    This will be our post/entry page, here we will have all of the information on the select resort, the specifics of this aren't an issue and I've already got this sorted.

Now, I've done a lot of reading up on custom post types, custom taxonomies and their abilities and uses but I'm hit with a situation at the moment where I can't decide on which route I should take. I've been experimenting over the last few hours with the setup of one custom post type (for resorts) and one hierarchical taxonomy (for locations). Which works some what ok BUT due to the limitations of the taxonomy UI within the admin panel it doesn't allow me to add my static content/images etc. (I'd much prefer to use a WYSIWYG especially from a clients point of view).

So this makes me wonder if it would be worth making two custom post types and scrapping taxonomies all together, making one of the post types resorts and the other locations. With the locations post type I could set it up like the pages module (which would give me hierarchical controls to allow me to organise my locations how I had originally planned) but is this a wise move? I mean from what I've read you shouldn't really organise content this way but I've got a feeling that maybe just a clash of contextual semantics (I could be wrong!). Would there be any limitations for me setting things up this way should I wish to add search functionality in the future? Or anything else for that matter?

I thought I'd mention this before I FINALLY click the submit button (apologies for the great wall of text) but pages... I've read here that they are powerful little gems within Wordpress, how should I be taking advantage of these if I'm using custom taxonomies? How well do they work with listing categories are they what I need?

Right, that about wraps up everything I've got to ask for now - maybe I should have split this into a few posts but hey! I hope this gives you guys enough information about what I'm trying to achieve and please if I am going wrong feel free to point me in the right direction I'm really eager to learn more about Wordpress and it's capabilities.

Regards
Danny

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So, at the end of the day, your content is about resorts (that is, "destination" = resort?

If so:

Custom Post Type: destination (semantically, it would be "resort", but you can use "destination" to meet your client's needs) Custom Taxonomy(ies): location (country, city, etc.)

EDIT:

How to parse the terminology:

Post: noun Taxonomies: adjectives

The Post is the thing - the content. Any taxonomies are ways of describing your Posts.

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  • This is similar to what I had originally setup but I need to be able to insert the static content for each section how would you suggest doing that with the limited UI available for taxonomies?
    – Danny
    Jun 6, 2011 at 1:38
  • Depending on the nature of the static content, you could make use of custom post-type and taxonomy archive index and single post template files.
    – Chip Bennett
    Jun 6, 2011 at 3:38
  • Yeah, exactly what I would have thought, this is what I have been using/experimenting with. I kept getting running in to errors with this method with the pages I had created in the pages module just didn't display. I think at one stage I almost had it but the page was displaying the title and content from one of the resorts listed within the taxonomy instead of the static page content that I had added to that specific page via the pages module.
    – Danny
    Jun 6, 2011 at 8:20
  • "Static Pages" != "template files". Reference the Template Hierarchy in the Codex. Also, if you're going to use a Custom Post Type, you need to add custom Posts, not static Pages.
    – Chip Bennett
    Jun 6, 2011 at 11:40
  • The resorts themselves will be the custom posts but in order to place the static content on each level of the taxonomies, these are going to need to be static pages, surely.
    – Danny
    Jun 6, 2011 at 11:45
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I think I would make or adjust a page template for this.

Here's what I'm thinking:

1 - they have and use their blog for each of the different countries and whatnot in no particular order. Use the categories to place country and city (individually) for each post.

For example Title: Turkey, Belek - 2009 Summer fiasco! (or whatever they want to title it as)
Post: Here is the entry with pictures and text and wowee!
Categories: Turkey, Belek, Beach, Resort... etc

2 - in the page template you can add navigation so that without providing information through a $_GET['Country'] and/or $_GET['City'] they're shown the options. The trick here is when they select something specific (like Turkey, Belek) you can filter the categories like this:

query_posts("showposts=15&offset=0&cat=3,11");

Assuming Turkey is the category id of '3' and Belek is '11'... You could just use query_posts("cat=3,11") but that should get you started.

Hope that helps!

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  • Hey Rohjay Thanks for replying, I think I prefer the method that I had mentioned in my question. I did manage to get it working somewhat how I wanted it but the issue arrose when I wanted to add static content to each category obviously with the limited UI with taxonomies I thought there maybe a better way to do this. Also I found myself making various different page templates for each slug (ie. /destinations/turkey/) to try to add this static content but it wasn't working. I think it may have something to do with the template hierarchy. Although I could be wrong.
    – Danny
    Jun 5, 2011 at 22:45

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