Guidance on hooking custom post types into membership plugin

  • futureisfiction

    (@futureisfiction)


    2 years, 11 months ago

    I’ve volunteered to setup a membership section of a nonprofit writers site, but am a bit over my head!

    1. First I created a custom post type for Members, so they could have profiles.
    2. Then I created a custom post type called Books, so that I could display their books along throughout the site as well as on their profiles.
    3. I created custom taxonomies for genres and services, so that site visitors could filter members (e.g. “mystery writers” or “copywriters”).
    4. I also created field groups for “member info” and “book info” so we could organize the data they give us and keep it uniform.

    (I did all those twice, because first I tried to hand code it and then I thought it better to rely on a plugin, and used Custom Post Types plugin.)

    Then when it got time to create the template, I couldn’t figure out how to associate the template I created with the member’s profile.

    So at that point, I thought, I should stop and decide on what the membership plugin will be, because the plugin will likely provide its own member profiles that I can style and hook into my existing content.

    After much deliberation, I purchased Armember. I asked them about linking the existing custom post types and taxonomies, and they replied, “it is not possible to access based on members’ taxonomies and custom categories.”

    I had hoped they could just tell me the hooks that I need to add to my child theme but it looks like even their paid support is not that good.

    So now I am not sure what to do. I was hoping to use this situation to learn more about the underlying code of WordPress (and I’ve learned quite a bit of PHP!) but now I am stuck. If there is no way to link the membership plugin to our profiles, then I am not sure it is worth doing at all. And this is all way too specific to find a tutorial on.

    On the other hand, I am pretty sure what ARMember is saying is impossible is very much possible, they just can’t be bothered to help. =(

    So to get to my questions at last…

    1. What might I put in my code to get the template I have created linked to the profiles they were created for?
    2. Is there something I might put in my code for Armember to replace their profile/custom post type with the one of my own creation, so that the taxonomies and whatnot will all work?

    I feel like this is a perfect opportunity to learn hooks, but I don’t know what to do/try next. I do have a staging area so I can tinker and break as needed.

    Thanks for any advice you can provide.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    2 years, 11 months ago

    What’s possible and how to accomplish it depends on what sort of object the plugin saves member data as. If it’s some kind of post type, any taxonomy can be associated with any post type and various post objects could be queried based on assigned terms.

    But if the member data is maintained in some sort of custom DB table, then it would be difficult to relate WP taxonomies to custom data. You’d need some kind of intermediate post type that can relate to both member data and taxonomy terms. And you’d need custom code to manage various operations on the data.

    Same goes for templates, if members are a post type, you merely need to correctly name the template files.
    https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/basics/template-hierarchy/

    But if members are not post types, you’d have to create some custom page templates that contain the code necessary to query the DB and display the results.
    https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/template-files-section/page-template-files/

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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