If you have ever used custom post types then you know how powerful they can be when it comes to organizing your content. What do you do though if you want to organize one of your post types according to another?
For example, let’s say you have two custom post types. One of them is your favorite movies, while the other is your favorite actors. One way to link these posts would be to create a taxonomy using the actor names and tag each movie with the actors that play in it. The problem with this is that now you will be managing an actors taxonomy as well as an actors custom post type. The best way to prevent this and streamline the relationships between your two pieces of content is to make the actual actors post type into a taxonomy. In this post we are going to show you how to do that.
First, download and install the CPT-onomies WordPress plugin. Once you do this if you go to Settings » CPT-onomies you will be able to create and organize all of your new custom post type taxonomies.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can control which post types are linked to one another. In this example, actors and directors are linked to movies. If you want to add or edit any of your custom post types, you can easily do this by selecting either the “add a new custom post type” button or editing your current custom post types (see screenshot below).
Once you are done adding and editing all of your post types you can use them just as you would any other tag or category. In our example actors and directors were linked to movies so if you go to the movies post type then you will notice that in the area normally reserved for taxonomies you can now add actors and directors to your movies.
Download CPT-onomies WordPress Plugin
Mehran Naghizadeh says
Many many thanks
nate says
How do these tools differ when dealing with many to many relationships…
Sudhi says
If we’ve the image of actors and directors and their names to be displayed, how to display that?? Can you please send a code snippet?
matt says
While this does allow you to select post types as relations in 1 post type at a time it does not recognize when posts are attached to each other. For example: If I have 2 post types. Movies and Actors. If I have a movie titles Titanic and I select an actor from the drop down by the name of Leo, if I go edit the actor Leo, he is not automatically attached to the movie Titanic in his post view.
Is this something that is possible with this plugin or no.
Paul says
I see that your CPT-onomies are displayed as a list with checkboxes to the left. While mine is just a search box – once I start typing, matching CTP-onomies appear. How do I make mine such that it will just list them with checkboxes?
kris says
In what way is this plugin different/better then the ‘Custom Post Type UI’-plugin? I’m in the search for something with these capabilities and did some testing witth ‘Custom Post Type UI’ but reading this post made me have second doubts so I would love to hear your opinion.
Editorial Staff says
This plugin lets you use Custom Post Types as Taxonomies. Custom Post Types UI plugin lets you create custom post types and custom taxonomies. It doesn’t let you use a CPT as a taxonomy.
Admin
Kris says
ok thanks, I think i got it now. Will do some testing with a new install to see if this can be used in my case.
Loren says
This concept is exactly what I have been looking for. How can I do this without using the plugin? I hand code all of my custom post types and would like to not be plugin-dependent.
Editorial Staff says
If you hand code all of your stuff, then you must know how to code. Open this plugin’s code, and see how they are doing it.
Admin