In this session we discuss the use of a custom post type to organize and display testimonials. We talk about different examples of organizing the testimonial for display such as using specific providers or by type of work but they could be grouped by any taxonomy. We discuss how to consider what you are going to use to trigger for relatedness and what are the circumstances in which you automatically want to display posts on another page.
Video Transcript
Member: Well, the question I have, I kind of little sidetrack here because I’m really interested in what you were just talking about with this custom post type and how this site you were working on use different groups of testimonials. Let me ask you a brief question about that because I’ve got a site I’m starting out and it’s got a number of different professionals and they all have their own little group of testimonials that exist on their main site and they’re doing a collective marketing site with just what I’m working on. If I use their testimonials I would create a separate post type for each one of those different professionals and I could come up with something similar…
Rick: No, no. You would create a post type for testimonials
Member: Right.
Rick: And you would create a taxonomy
Member: Okay.
Rick: for…
Member: Each of the professionals.
Rick: the provider.
Member: Okay.
Rick: and then you would use a query box to display the testimonials for a given provider.
Member: Okay, okay. I’ll get my head around that but that gave me another new whole idea of how I can best do that so I appreciate just seeing that last example.
Rick: Yeah. What you want to think about is context, right. What decides which testimonials should be displayed. On this site here, we said testimonials should display based on the sector or the industry in which the work was done, the type of work that was done and the language in which it was done. So we only have one post type, that’s testimonials but we have 3 different taxonomies.
Member: Okay in my case, these are all different varieties of medical professionals. We’ve got a Chiropractor, Acupuncturist, Yoga, Massage Therapist, Nutritionist you know, various professionals so they would be represented under each of their professional identities.
Rick: Well, and so you may have you know, service type and provider as 2 different taxonomies and then on a page that’s displaying acupuncture, you would assign the acupuncture service type to that page and the display of all testimonials based on that service type.
Member: Okay, okay.
Rick: You have to sort of sit down and think about what is the trigger for relatedness. What relates one post to another and what are the circumstances in which you want to automatically display a set of posts on another page.
Member: Okay, and then on a main area somewhere on the site I could end up using the query box and bringing them all in at a random way so that there was like one place where they just randomly came in to a page, couldn’t I?
Rick: One more time.
Member: Well, if I end up wanting to have them segregated but also in another place on the site have them say on an area on the front page where I’ll be able to use the query box and I would be able to set that up to bring those in and rotate and just be random and it could be random from the different legalities, the different professionals. Correct?
Rick: Yes, that’s exactly right in fact, that’s what this is here. This is a BX Content Slider box
Member: Right, similar to that.
Rick: that is randomly choosing to display 5 different testimonials or 10 different testimonials
Member: Okay.
Rick: out of a couple of hundred.
Member: Right, that’s the idea I would want to go far. Okay, perfect, perfect. Okay, I’ve got to get my head around that. Thank you, that was a perfect example. I hadn’t meant to even ask that today but that’s great.
Rick: I’m going to do a seminar on this site. This site just went alive today but I’m going to do a seminar on the concepts and the tools that we used to create this so that people can you know, implement things like this on their own sites because it takes full advantage of custom post types and custom taxonomies and the Thesis templating system and then a couple of my boxes most notably the Related Posts Query Box.
Member: It’s got exactly the kind of thing that I was trying to go through and figure out how to do on this site so that got coming up so it’s great.
Rick: Okay. Well, we’ll have one of those very soon.