Need help to structure our a complex hierarchy

Question

I am trying to get the exact same hierarchy structure of this site: https://theculturetrip.com/

To me it seems they have this category hierarchy:

-Continent
——-Country
————–City
-Food and Drink
-See and Do
-Art
-Literature
-etc.

If you click on a continent you will land on a page with posts in that continent sorted by the categories above (food and drink, art, literature, see and do).

Then if you click on a country you land on a page with posts in that country sorted by the same categories above (food and drink, art, literature, see and do).

Then if you click on a city you will land on a page with posts in that city sorted again… by the same categories above (food and drink, art, literature, see and do).

If you instead of clicking on a city you click on a category such as food and drink, you will be taken to a page where all the food and drink posts for that city appear (BUT NOT ALL FOOD AND DRINK POSTS IN GENERAL).

So my question is, is the category hierarchy they used as I described above? Or is it like this:

-Continent
-Food and Drink for this Continent
-See and Do for this Continent
-Art for this Continent
-Literature for this Continent
-etc.
——-Country
——-Food and Drink for this Country
——-Art for this Country
——-Literature for this Country
——-etc. for this Country
————City
————Food and Drink for this Country
————See and Do for this Country
————Art for this Country
————Literature for this Country
————etc. for this Country

This would lead to hundreds if not thousands of categories due to all the cities and countries this would need to be created for. Or would this rather be done by creating different pages for every single one of these?

I want to set my site up in the same exact way as this, but i just dont know how best to build the relationships.

Can somebody help with a solution here?

Thanks!

Answer 1

More than categories, you have custom taxonomy, it's easy to add custom taxonomy to post edit screen and retrieve these custom taxomnomies according to any logic with a custom WP_Query.

An example:

function continent_init() {
// create a new taxonomy
register_taxonomy(
    'continent',
    'post',
    array(
        'label' => __( 'Continent' ),
        'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'continent' )
    )
);
}
add_action( 'init', 'continent_init' );

The query to retrieve it (a [pre_get_posts][3] will be better than this)

$args = array(
'tax_query' => array(
    array(
        'taxonomy' => 'continent',
        'field' => 'slug',
        'terms' => 'europe'
    )
)
);
$query = new WP_Query( $args );

Hope it helps

Answer 2

@Benoti

Thanks for this info. That definitely helps. I will give this a try now.

Once I have created a taxonomy for the places, then how can I create an archive page that functions the same way as the "/category/" archive pages. Can I build a page using ordinary page builder on wordpress, and somehow make this the standard format for all /Continent, /Country, and /City pages?