How to filter custom posts by tags and custom fields?

Question

I'm planning a site for a client who wants users to be able to filter upcoming events by the following criteria:

Type i.e. Comedy, Theatre, Music etc.

Date Daily or Weekend

Duration Daily or Half day

I want to delve into Custom posts more, so will set up a Custom Post Type for 'Events' (non-hierarchical) and when creating a new post I'll add Custom Fields for Type, Date and Duration.

The question I have is how would I use query_posts() to:

1. List the events so that the soonest (i.e. next event to occur) appears first and later events last?
2. Filter by multiple meta values (Type, Date and Duration)?

I presume I need to create a series of options in my form's dropdown lists based on the custom field values right?

I've created a list of Events for a client before, but with no filtering possibilities. I used this query_posts() code to get the custom posts and order things:

// List the events by custom field 'Date':
$todaysDate = date('Y/m/d'); // set todays date to check against custom field

// query posts
query_posts('post_type=Event&meta_key=Date&meta_compare=>=&meta_value=' . $todaysDate . '&orderby=meta_value&order=ASC');

However, I can't see how I might change this code to filter by multiple custom fields...any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

you can use custom taxonomies and make you query_posts much easier! by that i mean create a custom taxonomy for type,duration like so:

add_action('init','register_event_tax');

function register_event_tax(){
register_taxonomy('even_type',array('events'), array(
    'hierarchical' => false,
    'labels' => 'type',
    'show_ui' => true,
    'query_var' => true,
    'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'type' ),
  ));

register_taxonomy('even_duration',array('events'), array(
    'hierarchical' => false,
    'labels' => 'type',
    'show_ui' => true,
    'query_var' => true,
    'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'duration' ),
  ));
}

then you can query posts like this:

query_posts('post_type=Event&duration=DAILY&type=COMEDY&meta_key=Date&meta_compare=>=&meta_value=' . $todaysDate . '&orderby=meta_value&order=ASC');

and you can change the duration and type to filter what ever type or duration you want.

hope this helps.