Soma Design

NOTE: I’ve moved this into its own project page, where you can now find the down­load link and leave com­ments. This post will no longer be updat­ed and com­ments are now off.

Word­Press 3.0 is almost ready for prime-time, and with it full sup­port for cus­tom post types. You can read about the tech­ni­cal details of adding a cus­tom post type, or why you should use them. The WP team have done a great job with bring­ing this func­tion­al­i­ty into the upcom­ing 3.0 release, but one thing that’s puz­zled me is (cur­rent) lack of good sup­port for 1) cus­tom URLs for that par­tic­u­lar post type only (some­thing like http://yourdomain.com/movies ) and 2) cus­tom tem­plates for that post type. (I’ll be using this to move port­fo­lio items to a “port­fo­lio” post type.)

But, that’s noth­ing a lit­tle code can’t fix. With the helper class I’ve made, the fol­low­ing is possible:

1. Cus­tom URLs for a land­ing page for your post type, with full pag­i­na­tion & feed sup­port. (eg http://yourdomain.com/movies/, http://yourdomain.com/movies/page/2/, http://yourdomain.com/movies/feed/ )
2. Cus­tom land­ing page tem­plates: if you reg­is­tered “movie” as your post type, you can use movie/index.php or movie.php in your theme direc­to­ry (falls back to index.php if they don’t exist)
3. Cus­tom sin­gle page tem­plates:  WP already looks for single-movie.php (and falls back to single.php). This func­tion allows you to use movie/single.php — great along­side movie/index.php for bet­ter theme organization.
4. adds class­es to body_class() and post_class() for that post type.

Usage

After includ­ing the SD_Register_Post_Type class and the helper func­tion sd_register_post_type(), all you need in your functions.php file (or wher­ev­er you choose to run this) is the fol­low­ing line:

sd_register_post_type( 'movie' );

That’s it. Call it again with a new argu­ment for anoth­er post type. Repeat as many times as you need post types. I’ve set good default argu­ments to pass to register_post_type(), but you can over­ride them with your own. (Read more about the $args here, here and here.)

sd_register_post_type( 'movie', $args_array );

Also, gram­mar pedants know that adding an “s” suf­fix is not appro­pri­ate for all plu­rals. In the case of post type “movie”, our URL land­ing struc­ture is http://yourdomain.com/movies, which works fine. But, for irreg­u­lar plu­rals, the func­tion accepts an option­al third argument:

sd_register_post_type( 'person', $args_array, 'people' );

The above URL struc­ture would then be http://yourdomain.com/people for the post_type “per­son”.

One note that’s very, very impor­tant: your cus­tom URLs won’t work until you go to Options → Perma­link in wp-admin and re-save your cur­rent URL struc­ture. This will flush WP’s cur­rent URL struc­ture and add our new rewrite rules. This is com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly expen­sive and you don’t want it hap­pen­ing every time, which is why I’m leav­ing it as a man­u­al oper­a­tion. You’ll only need to do it once (or after chang­ing the third plur­al argument).