Questions about Metadata

  • Resolved cpabell

    (@cpabell)


    7 years, 9 months ago

    I installed a theme on my WordPress site that displays thumbnails of all the pages on my site that use the “portfolio-item” template. I love the theme, but wish it would go a little further and allow my clients to sort the portfolio items by category. By default, WordPress doesn’t have a category field for the pages, only blog posts. I was wondering if I could use WordPress’ metadata to sort:
    – first I’d create a custom field called “category” on every page
    – assign each page a value for category
    – and somehow tell the page to load only portfolio-items with the category value, depending on which one the client clicks on

    I know this can be done using php, however I’m hoping to use metadata as I feel it’d be a little easier to control, since it’s native to WordPress. Could anyone help me out with this?

    Thanks in advance!

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  • TheHandOfCod

    (@chrisodell)

    7 years, 9 months ago

    There is a plugin which already does this https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-category-to-pages/

    But if you wanted to code your own solution then I would approach your problem from a different angle. This would be work out how the theme is getting the pages that have the portfolio-item template and then copy/modify that code to apply to posts of certain categories.

    You would need to:-

    a) Create a child theme so that when the theme you are modifying get’s updated your changes are not overwritten. See https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

    b) Inspect the code which gets the pages with the portfolio-item, copy, paste & modify as necessary and add your modified code to the child theme functions.php.

    c) Override the template which is displaying the thumbnails by adding a template with the same name in your child theme, and then modify your child theme template to use your modified function.

    The reason I would take this approach is that by using child themes it gives you greater flexibility.

    If you have a lot of pages and want to change which categories you apply your logic to, with your initial proposal you will have to go through each page to change the category. Whereas you could add applicable categories over time, so that the thumbnail logic could apply to several categories.

    The initial coding will be slightly less work I think because you are re-using more of the existing code, and existing WordPress functionality.

    Thread Starter cpabell

    (@cpabell)

    7 years, 9 months ago

    I’d prefer to go at it with my own code. Great idea with the child themes! I wasn’t aware of them until now. Thanks a bunch, I will definitely give it a try!

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