Utilising posts with various post types & categories?

Question

I need some advice on how to arrange my posts to make it user friendly in the back end. I've created lot's of websites using pages but this is the first time that the post area is quite comprehensive.

I've got 4 different types of post - news, events, articles & opportunities. Firstly what's the best way to separate these? So in the cms the user can just see a list of all the news or all the events... i.e not everything post type in one big list. I'd usually use sub-pages but your not able to do this with posts.

Secondly, each post type has several themes or sectors associated with it. So news maybe associated with biotechnology, financial or business. While events maybe associated with funding, networking or recruitment. It's important that when the user creates the post that they don't see a long list of all these words, it has to separate out the words associated with news or events.

Thirdly, I need to utilise the tags section as is. So any keywords they may think can just be added as a tag.

The biggest problem I've found is the second point. There doesn't seem any obvious way to stop it showing big lists of things associated with other post types. So on a news item it's not only showing all the news sectors it can be associated with, it's also showing all the events sectors, which is what I don't want.

UPDATE: If you look at the screenshot below. I've added the categories - news, events, articles, opportunities. I then added the sectors as sub categories of each one. It's just added them all in one big list. If the subcategories were indented then it would solve the problem!!

Answer 1

Post Types

I would certainly register 'News', 'Events' and 'Opportunities' as custom post types, while maybe keeping 'Articles' as the default 'Post' post type. (See the Codex on custom post types).

This would, among other things, allow you to register/de-register metaboxes for specific post types where appropriate. Also, as requested, 'News', 'Events', etc will have their own menu tab (like Posts, Pages, Links etc.).

This would help with the second request...

Custom Taxonomies

To each post type you can register a custom taxonomy (see Codex on custom taxonomy). They come in two types: hierarchical (like categories) and non-hierarchical (like tags). (See register_taxonomy)

This would allow you to create 'news categories', etc. This will only be visible on the post types you register them for, (that is the meta-box will only appear on those post types). So the news categories would only appear on the news post type.

A final note, if you want 'global' tags (that appear on each post type) you just need to give each of your custom post types the ability to support the 'tags' taxonomy when you register them (see the taxonomies argument register_post_type).