Shared terms between taxonomies

Question

Need some help from you.

It's a matter of classification.

Here is the deal:

I've got a custom post type about movies and I set up some custom taxonomies (non hierarchical, so acting like tags) for the crew. So I've got "Director", "Screenplay writer" and others.

I.e. Movie: The rise of Wordpress Director: John Doe Screenplay writer: John Smith

Everything works good, when I click on a term I get a sort of "personal page" of the person (I also add some custom fields to the term page in Wordpress so I can add additional info such as a picture, the website link and something else).

So here is the question. What if the Director of a movie is also the screenplay writer? I mean, at the moment I've got to duplicate the term, one for each taxonomy.

I wonder if there is a way to do such thing: Define a general taxonomy like "crew" where each term is a single person. Then pick up every term associating it with the role.

Someone has an idea about that?

Even different approaches will be appreciated!

Bye guys, thank you for your great support Carlo

Answer 1

Since it looks like the "personal pages" are important in your project, I suggest a different approach. Use two distinct custom post types, one for the movies (the same you are already using) and one additional for the crew. You can create relationships between these custom post types using custom code or a specific plugin, i.e. Posts 2 posts or ZigConnect. When you create a binding between a movie and a person you can select the role (director, etc) as an additional field.