Help with the loop (custom post type taxonomy)

Hi @monkeybrain

1. It’s always recommended that you NOT post a second time when you have an unswered question (unless it’s to post your solution). The reason is that while this might (very) temporarily bump your question up, it doesn’t always help you. Many of the more advanced WP users and developers focus on the list of ‘no replies’ (those posts that have no responses) in order to help those whom no one else is helping (as we have time, which often requires patience on your part). If you respond to your own initial post, it drops off the list of ‘no replies’ and we assume someone else is helping you…..which actually slows the likelihood of getting real help.

2. ‘photo-gallery’ => ‘black-and-white’ is not valid. In your code you might use something like ‘taxonomy’ => ‘photo-gallery’, but it all depends on what you’re trying to do.

SO what are you trying to do? Display all the photos that are tagged (in this example) as ‘black-and-white’? Or just display the terms associated with each photo in the gallery (to show what other terms a particular photo in this gallery is tagged with?)

Knowing what you’re trying to do on your template page will help us to come up with the correct solution.

Great! Now that I understand what you’re trying to do, I *may* be able to help, as I’m doing something similar on one site, where I have a custom post type with a custom taxonomy, and for each taxonomy I want to list the post titles……I think you can modify this code to do what you want (I added some comments to my code and I’ll explain more below):

$terms = get_terms( 'retail_category', array('orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC') );

The first thing is to get all the terms in your custom taxonomy – in this part you would replace ‘retail-category’ with your custom taxonomy which is ‘photo-gallery’ – I’m sorting by name, which makes sense in your case too, but you can change the order by to whatever you like.

if ($terms) {
     foreach($terms as $term) {
     $args = array(
      'post_type' => 'retail',
      'posts_per_page' => -1,
      'ignore_sticky_posts' => 1,
      'orderby' => 'title',
      'order' => 'ASC',
      'tax_query' => array(
            array(
            'taxonomy' => 'retail_category',
            'field' => 'name',
            'terms' => $term->name)
      )
    );

In this section I am setting up my arguments for doing a new query (below) to find ALL (the -1) of the related custom posts fore EACH taxonomy term where the assigned taxonomy term matches (by name) the taxonomy in the FOREACH statement – my CPT is ‘retail’, yours is ‘photos’ (note: it’s a better practice to name your CPTs with the singular term, not the plural, so your CPT really *should* be named ‘photo’ as each post is one photo, right? But honestly it’s your call, you can keep it plural if you like 🙂 )

global $post;
    $myposts = new WP_Query($args);
      if ( $myposts->have_posts() ) {
        echo '<ul><li><h5 class="retailcatname">' . $term->name . '</h5><ul>';

Here is the query and if it finds posts within a term, then I’m echoing the name of the Taxonomy as a ‘header’ for the list of post titles that appear below it, you may not need to do this – and of course I’m using the UL and LI because mine is a real ‘list’. If you don’t want a header with the taxonomy term name, just leave out this echo and move right into the “while” part below.

while( $myposts->have_posts() ) : ($myposts->the_post());
           echo '<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">';
           echo the_title();
           echo '</a></li>';
         endwhile;

SO while I have matching posts for the taxonomy term, I list each and display it’s title as a link (A). You can display whatever you want, the thumbnail and/or the content. NOTE THAT the “global $post” in the above section is required to access the post data.

echo '</ul></li></ul>';
   }
 }
}

Closing the list….not necessary if you’re not using a list.

I think if you modify this to use your custom taxonomy (photo-gallery) and custom post type (photos) and then in the section with the “while” statement just echo what you want displayed, this might work for you.

Good luck!

May I just say that your English is actually very good – I’d never have guessed it isn’t your native language.

And, apologies if I’ve misunderstood your intial post.

The taxonomy template you’ve created (taxonomy-photo-gallery.php) *should* work fine without needing a query…..

So in this example you’ve posted

<?php if ( have_posts() ): ?>
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
// Content like <?php the_title(); ?> etc...
<?php else: ?>
	No posts to display
<?php endif; ?>

All you should need to do is replace //Content like[…] with the_thumbnail and whatever else you want displayed (it sounds like just the image)……you might have to add global $post but aside from that it should work.

Now that said, your query above will never display anything because you’re missing the very vital part “if have posts,while have post, the post”….without establishing ‘the post’ WP won’t know what ‘the_thumbnail’ is….it needs to look more like this:

<?php $args = array(
    'post_type' => 'photos',
    'photo-gallery' => 'black-and-white'
  );
$term_loop = new WP_Query($args);
if(have_posts() : while(have_posts() : the_post(); ?>
<div class="image">
<?php the_thumbnail() ?>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

BUT you shouldn’t need that – the standard WP query and taxonomy-photo-gallery.php template should work out of the box by just copying the tag.php file and only leaving in the bits you want for the content.

Lastly, you don’t need a template for each term – you could make one, but it isn’t necessary, if WP doesn’t find one it falls back to the taxonomy template you already created….but you don’t need to repeat the query on that page – WP should just use the template to display *any* content it finds that has that term applied.

Check out this page on template hierarchy:
https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/basics/template-hierarchy/

In particular this section of the page:
http://developer.wordpress.org/themes/functionality/categories-tags-custom-taxonomies/

I really hope this helps, if not I’ll try to get the attention of a couple of forum moderators on this.