I was able to find this plugin:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-tag-cloud-widget/screenshots/
However, it still has no way to know that the “tags” in posts, is the same as my “subjects” in the book reviews.
You can’t make “tags” the same as “subjects” in book reviews any more than you can make “tags” to be “book authors” or “genres”. Subjects and tags are two completely separate taxonomies in WordPress and, while you can convert all your tags to be Subjects instead (and thereby lose those tags on regular blog posts) you can’t share the terms contained within separate taxonomies.
Taxonomies are ways to group objects by different things. They are intended to be separate. For posts, you can group content by category or tag. For book reviews, you can group content by book or review author, genre, subject matter, rating, reading level, etc. So I can look at a list of posts that all have a similar tag or I can look at a list of books that all have a similar author.
I can add support for tags in book reviews, however, since book reviews are a different post type than posts, you may not get the desired result when you click on a link to all “posts” with that tag. Rather than getting a combined list of books and posts — unless your theme is written (or modified) to display book reviews as well as posts on archive pages — what you’ll still get is a list of all posts with that tag. Archive pages display all content of a specific type with a matching taxonomy term. So if I have a post tag named “cats”, and I’m looking at the cats tag archive, I would get a list of posts with that tag. If I share that taxonomy (tags) with another post type (book reviews), and I navigate to that archive page, I will now be looking at a list of book reviews that have been grouped by the taxonomy term “cats”. The database query that runs on archive pages would need to be altered to combine both searches into one.
If the only desired outcome is to affect the tag cloud — and you have absolutely no intention of allowing visitors to see all posts from all post types that have that particular tag — and you want to be able to share terms, this can be done. But because there are so many caveats and because customization of the theme is required to be able to support a combined list of posts and book reviews, it’s not something I could easily be convinced to add to the plugin.
I hope that makes sense.
Yes, that makes sense. I do want visitors to see results from both post types, so I’ll figure another way to allow them to do that. Thanks.
I’ve created some custom menus just so I could display all of the Titles, Book Authors, Genres, and Subjects. The Titles menu seems to be working fine, but no links for any Book Authors or Subjects will return a list of matching Book Reviews. Am I thinking about these groupings correctly? I should be able to see any book review that is written by a particular author when I click on his name, right? Same with Subjects.
http://aletheiabaptistministries.org/Blog/book-review/the-rapture-question-walvoord-nov-2013/
In this link, I should be able to see all of Walvoord’s books by clicking his name right? Also, I should be able to see all of the book reviews in “Eschatology” by clicking on that link at the bottom, too.
I’m not sure what’s going on but there are some weird things going on with your theme. Have you tried using a different theme to see if you still get the problem (e.g. one of the default Twenty- themes)?
Alternately, you can try going to the Settings → Permalinks page and just clicking the Save Changes button without changing anything to refresh the permalinks in case that’s the issue.
Remember to start a new post when posting a different issue that way they can be tracked properly (e.g. this issue was already marked as resolved).
Ah. Sorry about that. I’ll remember to start a new post next time.
I refreshed the permalinks and it didn’t change anything that I can see. I did switch it over to Twenty-Twelve and the links worked fine, so it must be something with my “evolve” theme. However, Twenty-twelve is not the theme I wanted. I will check with the theme developers to see what they think. But do you see any way around this, or can you see the exact problem?
Ah. Sorry about that. I’ll remember to start a new post next time.
I refreshed the permalinks and it didn’t change anything that I can see. I did switch it over to Twenty-Twelve and the links worked fine, so it must be something with my “evolve” theme. However, Twenty-twelve is not the theme I wanted. I will check with the theme developers to see what they think. But do you see any way around this, or can you see the exact problem?
The theme developers just say they don’t test their theme with third party plugins and I should find a different plugin that works with their theme. So I guess my question then is do you see a way around this issue. I don’t even know what weird things are happening. If there’s not a way, then I may just have to find a different plugin for it because the theme look is something I don’t want to change.
I wish I did know the reason it was doing it. It’s something to do with their taxonomy templates, but, as I said, there were some other things going on that were weird, too (code that was being displayed that shouldn’t be). What I might suggest (if you feel comfortable with it and want to try to diagnose the issue), is edit your wp-config.php and set define( 'WP_DEBUG', true ); (default is false). My guess is you’ll have some sort of error displaying on those pages and that will help identify what the issue may be.
I’ve tested the plugin on a number of themes from the WordPress.org repository (all of which go through a theme testing process before they get allowed into the repository) so I know it works with themes that are developed with WordPress coding standards. My guess is that theme is doing something in a way that is conflicting with WordPress best practices and/or guidelines and it’s breaking on the taxonomy archive pages.
ok. And that may be why the developer is reluctant to really address the issue.
As you can tell, I’m an amateur, so I may shop around a little more for a plugin that will work rather than get in too deep over my head. 🙂 Thanks for your help.
No problem. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that every plugin will work in every environment — just like software and hardware don’t work on every computer because they are all built differently — especially if we (developers) aren’t all on the same page about how we’re writing our code.
