Writing a custom Glossary plugin

Question

I'm just about to start work on a Glossary plugin for my fishkeeping website.

My fish guru has suggested that he would like to be able to

• include images and
• easily link to other glossary entries.

To begin with I was intending just to write a taxonomy : title, slug, description, parent. with parent being the initial of the glossary entry for easy searching.

That probably won't do the trick however - how could I thus incorporate images or linking?

What would be the most effective way of going about this?

• A Custom Post Type?
• How can I provide the Glossary entry authors with a simple way of linking to another Glossary entry?

EDIT

I'm specifically looking for a glossary, with the following kind of entries:

Cyanobacteria - Phylum of generally blue-green coloured bacteria, often confused with algae, that obtain their energy via photosynthesis and include unicellular and colonial species. Some species occur commonly in aquaria where they're normally regarded as pests.

and..

Ich - Common name for Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, a protozoan which infects freshwater fish. Also referred to as white spot.

Answer 1

Since, presumably, there would be no more than one image per glossary entry, I would use a custom post type. The CPT should support a featured image, title, description, and excerpt, parents are not necessary, but might make it easier, depending on how your design plays out.

To allow categorization of these, I would incorporate a custom taxonomy, maybe two, depending on how you want to do it. A hierarchical taxonomy is a must, as it will allow you to categorize between species, etc and will give your posts logical organization. A non-hierarchical taxonomy might be something to consider. A non-hierarchical taxonomy would allow you to group things a bit more abstractly, for example: you could use the hierarchical taxonomy to do things like fresh vs salt water fish and the non-hierarchical one to do things like colors and descriptions. This would allow users the ability to drilldown if they knew exactly what they were looking for, or the ability to peruse if they didn't have much of an idea ("I wonder what other fish are blue" sorta thing)