Dynamically insert an article at the top of a taxonomy archive - or?

Question

I'm making a directory for half a dozen sorts of venues that are located in innumerable cities in all 50 US states. My plan has been to use a custom post type for each venue type and then assign a hierarchical "location" taxonomy to all of them.

When I create my "location" taxonomy archives, I'd like to start plugging in information about each state and eventually each major city. I envision an article about the location, a list of related tags and categories about what could be found in that location, and some excerpts from blog posts. Once you click through to a venue type, you'd get a list of that sort of venue in the "location."

How can I dynamically add an article about that location to the top of a location taxonomy's archives?

Or, should I have gone with a "location" custom post type instead? However... that would still give me a location-related taxonomy archive that does not begin with an article about the location.

Answer 1

I am not sure off-hand if custom taxonomies have this (I'm almost positive they do) but Tags and Categories already have a Description field you can fill out, and then display on any page. It would take some modification of your template files but what you can do is something like this:

1. Enter the description in the appropriate field

2. Use this code to display it on archive.php or whatever controls your archive pages:

   $termdesc = term_description( $term_id, 'location' /* or taxonomy name */ );
   if( $termdesc != '' )
       echo $termdesc;
   

Code above is using term_description.

Answer 2

Just make a taxonomy template and customize it with whatever you want.

The WordPress hierarchy for taxonomies flows like this.

archive.php ---> taxonomy-$taxonomy-$term.php --> taxonomy-$taxonomy.php --> taxonomy.php

So you can make a template called taxonomy-location.php

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

Answer 3

You can use both location taxonomy and a location post-type. That way you can put much more information about the location e.g post-thumbnail or custom-fields and have it loaded on every location taxonomy query.

1. Register the location post-type e.g location-post
2. Add a location-post for every location-term you made
3. On the location-post add a custom-fields that relates to the location-term ID e.g 'location-term'(key) = '12'(value=the location-term ID).
4. If you already using taxonomy-location.php, you can use a get_post query with a meta_key parameter to call the location-post right before the loop.

Hope this help