Top 10 Use Cases for Custom Post Types (Take Your Sites to the Next Level)

so today i want to cover a technique that is super valuable i use it on pretty much every website and that is simply using custom post types now i'm not going to dive into i'm not going to do a deep dive let's say on custom post types i am going to show you how to create custom post types but what i really want to cover is the top 10 use cases for custom post types because i don't know if you're like me but it took me a while to catch on to the value of custom post types now mind you i've been a wordpress user since like 2005 so when i say a while like you know i don't know what year i actually caught on and into the power of custom post types it's been a while obviously but still it like when i first heard about custom post types i really didn't understand what they were for or why i would use them and today i use them like i said on nearly every website and i'm telling you if you can understand and grasp the concepts of custom post types really understand the use cases behind them it's going to take your website building to the next level and it's going to make your life a whole lot easier and it's going to make your clients life a whole lot easier and it's gonna it really expands what you're able to do with websites in terms of querying things using dynamic content and so on and so forth so i don't want to get too deep into it i've got a long enough tutorial for you already cooked up so this is just the intro let's go ahead and get over to it but before we we do i just want to thank you again for being a part of the channel make sure you hit subscribe hit like drop a comment i respond to every comment and just thank you for the growth of this channel but let's go ahead and get into it all right guys let's talk about the top 10 uses for custom post types this is primarily for business websites we're going to talk about the why we're going to talk about each post type and then i'm actually going to show you how to make some custom post types because it's so easy and i really just want to get you guys using custom post types if you're not already using them and then if you are building websites for businesses specifically this is really going to take your game to the next level uh if you can really help organize a business's website in this fashion so before we get started let's go ahead and talk about why like why are we going through the quote unquote trouble it's really not trouble at all it actually makes your life and their life and everybody's life a whole lot easier but let's talk about the why behind custom post types first reason is it makes data easier to query so when you are trying to get things to display on the front end of the website when everything is created as a page so let's say all of your services are pages all of your events are pages all of these different things are pages and then you go to try to create an events page and you want to query all the events onto that page but you've created events as pages for some reason or or services right every every business website pretty much has a services page or products page and if you want to query all the services or products like it's it's not very easy when they're not in a custom post type so custom post types make data and you're going to see as i do future videos you know why this is or exactly what this means but for right now if you don't know what querying means or you don't know what repeaters are in oxygen then you know just take my word for it it makes data easier to query on the website it also makes data categorizable if that's if that's a word with one or more multiple or one or multiple taxonomies so basically what we can do is create categories a special type of category if we want to you can use of course your wordpress default categories but let's say you had a use case and we'll go over this when we get to the specific examples where you wanted to create a custom taxonomy which is a custom type of category and then maybe you wanted multiple categories to be assigned to the same thing that is also possible with custom post types it makes it easier to attach custom fields so if you have a specific post type and or a data type you can even think of it as and that data type has custom information that needs to be stored in the database to go along with it then a custom post type makes perfect sense because it's very easy uh basically when you're when you're creating custom fields in the back end it's going to ask you you know what do you want to attach these custom fields to and if you just say pages well it's going to attach it to all pages and if you're using pages for a bunch of different things suddenly these custom fields are attached to everything and you don't want that right but if we make a custom post type we can attach those custom fields to a specific custom post type and they don't affect anything else in your wordpress admin so that's super helpful and powerful it also just keeps the dashboard cleaner and more organized and really i should say the database but again if you think about websites where people use pages for everything all of your services are pages your products are pages you're this sort of your pages your you know everything is a page uh or a post even uh so people do this with posts as well it's not it's everything is jumbled together everything is completely disorganized it's just very hard to manage a site where nothing no like thought has been put into all right how are we going to really architect this website and custom post types provide that organization and that underlying architecture and then of course you're going gonna get unique uh urls i didn't put that in the list but this is gonna give you the ability to have custom slugs uh you know if you're doing seo there can be value here we can create custom category pages for things that extends your seo ability in some regards sometimes you don't want category or archive pages to come along with your custom post types that's cool you can turn them off right you have a lot of flexibility with custom post types it also makes it easier to create and query relationships so if you're familiar with bi-directional relationships using advanced custom fields or metabox dot io you can relate one thing to another which we'll talk about when we get to the specific examples why you would want to do that and and how powerful that actually is and we're going to go over the how as well so i was going to make i will be making separate videos for how to do custom post types in this video i'm just going to cover the very like bare minimum just how to get started with creating some custom post types but i'll do some deeper dives into that as well all right let's go and ahead and just let's start talking about the individual custom post types i mentioned that there's going to be 10 of them the first one is services classic business website use case you want to create a custom post type for services so that you can list all of a company's services and then you can create hierarchy between the services as well so i'm going to go ahead just you can see this will get you this practical standpoint going where we create some custom post types so we're going to go to installed plugins and i'm going to show you what you're going to need in order to create your first custom post type if you have metabox.io some of you bought into the lifetime membership for metabox you would create these through metabox.io if you don't have metabox dot io then you will want to get a plug-in it is free called custom post type ui this is going to be the standard for creating custom post types in wordpress you're going to see this like if you're logging into client sites that have custom post types 90 of the time they're going to be created with this plug-in right here five percent of the time i would say they're going to be created manually uh with with code in the hd access file and then like the other five percent of the time they might be using something like metabox uh but this is the one you're gonna see most often it's probably the one that you're gonna wanna start with so custom post type ui uh once you have installed that it's gonna put in a custom post type ui area over here and all you're going to do is go to add edit post types and you're going to see that this is a clean install i have no custom post types in here so this is the the exact screen that you are going to be met with when you're creating your first custom post type so it's going to ask you for the post type slug so this is going to be a services custom post type so i'm going to do services now if you're big in seo you might want to customize this for something else but we're just going to keep it nice and basic services it's going to ask you for the plural label so that would be services the singular label would be service and what's cool about this is like there's all these fields because if you look over here like there's all posts add new this is what you're creating you're creating one of these and so all of these labels have to be customized instead of doing them manually though you just click this little link right here populate additional labels based on my chosen labels which are right here and now if i go down you'll see and i always take the my out from in front of that so it's already created the menu name services all items are called all services add new is going to be add new add new item is add new service you'll see what all this looks like when i hit save but basically you can pretty much keep all of these the default once you fill those in automatically and then you're going to come down to the settings area and you're going to see this public true or false all right so we want to primarily there are use cases for setting this to false but primarily you're going to leave this on true you're going to leave publicly queryable on true you're going to have show ui as true show in nav menus as true delete with user false that is the default you want to leave that rest api true has archive so this is where a lot of times you you may want to change away from the default which is false if you want to have a archive page so you can think of like a blog category you click on the blog category page it shows you all articles from that page that is an archive page you if you want that for this type of custom post type you would set this to true now for a services page i would create a services page manually and i would put a repeater on that services page and that's how i would query all of the services so i'm going to set this to false i don't need a second archive page or an automatic archive page that's a url that i would have to create an archive template for i don't want to do that and i don't want any duplication issues either when i create a manual one versus having an automatically generated url for the archive so i just set that to false exclude from search you would set this to false as the default especially for something like services because if somebody's searching on your site you're going to want them to be able to find your services pages capability type is set to post it's going to behave as a post which if you look in and you know the reason we're doing this in a lot of ways is because we can't create these custom page types like it's just kind of not a thing in wordpress i mean you could set this to page but the problem is pages don't have categories uh and and so they're you know much more difficult to apply taxonomies to whereas posts obviously you can have categories multiple categories and on and on and on hierarchical so if you if you want to be able to nest services under services then you want to set this to true i almost always set this to true we'll see a use case for this in a second rewrite set to true is the default that's fine with front query var all of these are fine as the default show in menu true you can set the menu position which is over here so where you want the services to show up you can you can have control over that show in menu i set to true and then we can determine what this sets and i'm going to show you turning these on and off in just a second what happens but categories and taxonomies is down here they're this is a little tricky how we have to set this up but i'll i'll show you how to do it in just a second let's talk about the supports almost always we want to have a title even if we're not going to be using the title this is just for the backend organization purposes then this is do you want the gutenberg editor to be available inside of this custom post type if not you would turn off the editor when i am very heavy into advanced custom fields i often turn off the editor so that clients cannot put information inside the editor unless it makes sense to do so where a custom post type may have very large body copy and i'm using an inner content element on a template i don't want to get too advanced with this stuff but uh you can turn off the gutenberg editor if you want to turn on and off featured images excerpts basically you're turning off all of the on or off all of the function of the custom post types um so what i'm gonna do is basically leave this for now and we're just gonna hit add post type just to see what happens so the screen resets it's basically asking me to add a new one if i want to if i want to see the ones i've already created i can go to edit or view so edit would allow me to edit any of my custom post types if i go to view you're going to see them and you're going to see all the settings in one like table basically so this is a good way to get like a gl a glance or a glimpse at your existing custom post types but the real meat of what we're doing here is now over here so you're gonna see services uh now you'll see this little thumbtack i do wanna point out so i'm gonna go to edit taxonomies sorry edit post types and i'm going to choose my post type services it's choosing it for me because it's the only one and if i just search for icon there you go so menu icon you are able to customize this if i go to dash icons and they give you a little link here that's a services one so i would just look for something that's like services related uh like i think there's a hammer we'll just use the wrench so like this wrench right here so i'm gonna copy this little class dash icons admin tools and i'm just going to paste it right here and then you're going to see it shows me the little wrench and i hit save now there's a wrench next to my custom post type so that's a good little way to you know help customize these a little bit further but now when i see here i have all services and add new service now let's say we want to attach a taxonomy to this so we're going to go check in just a second and see what it looks like to add a new service but we're not quite set up yet for our services because the service should in most cases be categorized so i'm going to go to add edit taxonomies and i'm going to create a services cat now this is just the slug you can name this any it could be like s cat or if you want to keep them small um you could do something for seo related uh but i'm just gonna do services cat and then i'm gonna do service categories and then service category so a single category versus multiple categories and then i'm going to click services that's what i'm attaching it to that's the post type that i'm attaching this taxonomy to and then once again populate additional labels you're going to see all the label options then you're going to see another set of settings again do i want these categories to be hierarchical can i nest one category under another yes i want that to be true it's a lot of the same settings the one thing i would say is true for show admin column so i'll show you what that means in just a second and then show in quick bulk edit panel if you want to be able to bulk add categories to a custom post type from the edit screen then i would set that to true as well and i'm going to just hit add taxonomy and then i'm going to go back to edit post types and i'm going to edit my services post type and i'm going to come all the way to the bottom and i'm going to make sure that this is checked so service categories is associated with this custom post type now under services you're going to see i can make unique service categories that's pretty cool right so let's just pretend now let's let's like get off to the races and actually put some data in here so you can see what's going on now rem let's just say i was a roofing company and so i'm going to have some services right so i'm going to go to add new and i'm going to add roof repair as a service and we're going to go over in service categories and let's think about um how i might do this so we might have roofing services and then we might have i'm going to hit add and we might have roof maintenance services okay and then we might we may have some other things right um for now i'm just going to put these two because we don't we don't want to get too complicated with this we got to get back to our list we got to get back to the things that we were we were talking about but i just created a roof repair page effectively you can now think of these as pages okay so i created a roof repair page and i categorized it now i'm going to go back oh sorry i should hit publish first or you could save it as a draft whatever you want to do and you'll see i can still edit this in oxygen so i'm not forced to use gutenberg or anything like that i can edit this page in oxygen but i'm going to go back for now so there's my roof repair now i'm going to do another service and this one's going to be called roof replacement and this is going to be a roofing service and i'm going to hit publish all right and then i'm going to go back cool and then actually this one if i edit it i can take off the it's not a maintenance service it's a main service and then let's say i wanted to do another one where this is actual like roof maintenance that this might maybe this oh here's a good uh service category how about how about this you know we didn't even do these well all right hold on all right i'm gonna make a new category and this is gonna be called commercial i probably should have done this like maybe put some thought into this before i did it um all right let's but the cool thing is you can you can change anything at any time so i'm going to go to my service categories and here's where you can just edit your categories so i decide yeah i don't like these two so i'm going to delete them and sorry my dog is like moaning in the background hopefully that's not too distracting so how about instead of commercial i can also have residential right those would be two two like optimal things that would be in a normal roofing company so we have residential and we have commercial so now i'll go back to my services and remember i said we wanted to be able to bulk edit custom post types watch this i hit roof repair roof replacement edit apply and i say these are residential and then my other one is commercial remember i said show an admin column this is what i meant so you can see them from your admin panel what things are categorized as now think about querying these things right if i wanted to create a page where i wanted to show all residential services i can create a repeater set it to show residential services from the services custom post type and it'll only show these two things on that page and then if i had a commercial page and i created a repeater and said i want you to query all services custom post types in the category of commercial it would show all of my commercial services on that page automatically that's fantastic that's really really powerful so this is doing a custom post type for services i showed you how to create categories i showed you how to create the actual posts which you can think of like i said as pages they're editable in oxygen you will be able to attach custom fields to these but we're not going to cover that in this video instead let's get back to our top ten so number one was services we just saw how to create that number two is products now when we're talking about products i'm not talking about things you're going to sell direct to consumer with a shopping cart if you're gonna do that if you're gonna put a price on these things you want people to be able to add them to a cart and check out that's not what this is for you use woocommerce for that if you want to have products where and i'll give you a use case i have a client who is a luxury car broker he's he literally brokers car deals that are like you know 500 000 million dollar cars collectors cars sports cars all that good stuff right he's obviously not a woocommerce play okay nobody's adding a bentley to their cart and checking out okay but it's still a product like that's his product that's what he does so he has these cars in inventory and he wants to list them on the website he wants to rank them for seo terms because a lot of people search for these types of cars okay so we created a products custom postside now it's not called products it was called cars so i'll show you exactly how that looks on the back end i'm not going to do this for everything because you're going to get the drift and i don't want to just waste your time but if i go to custom post type add edit post type and this is exactly what i did for him we did cars and so i did cars and car populate additional and now i'll do it a lot faster because i'm not explaining everything to you and then coming down here hierarchical true and then i think that was pretty much it we don't need the editor for anything uh we do need a featured image we need a title and that's pretty much it and i hit add post type and now you see i have cars over here i did forget to do one thing which is add a cute little icon right so if i go down to our icon page right here so i open up and then we can just see if there's like a car again i don't want to waste like too much of your time here you know you're you're free to fast forward guys this is youtube you can probably watch in faster mode i don't know all right there's there's none let's do a happy face all right because i can't find a car at least not scanning that quickly all right so i'll throw that in and save you can also do a custom icon by the way uh so there's our cars now i want to add new cars all right so we'll just say bentley lots uh lots of money okay a bentley lots of money and then we're gonna hit publish cool and now i can have a featured image for the car i can attach custom fields like the price of the car uh you know how many cylinders it has all this other stuff but there is my custom post type for cars if i wanted to do a taxonomy add edit taxonomies and we'll say car cat and then car categories car category and we'll attach it to cars and we'll hit populate and we'll come all the way down yes true admin column true hierarchical true boom add taxonomy for some reason you still have to go to add uh to edit the post type for cars and attach it to the post type car categories but now you'll see under cars i have car categories look at that look how fast that works right and now my car pages aren't mixed up in all my other pages and my services pages aren't mixed up in all my other pages everything is perfectly organized on the back end categorizable queryable you see where i'm going with this right so this would be like luxury and we could make another one like sports and we could make another one like you know whatever you can even do one for colors you can do so many options because you can attach multiple taxonomies to the same custom post type but let's go ahead and get back to figma so that's an example of products for custom post types next would be reviews and testimonials now this is where it gets really really powerful i'm not going to create one for reviews and testimonials right now but i want you to imagine that that roofing company that we did services for but we also create a reviews and testimonials custom post type and then we talk about bi-directional relationships so when i and i'll do a video on this in detail when i create a service that service i'm going to have clients who left me testimonials for that service well think about this what if on the roof repair page i want to only show roof repair testimonials well i don't create categories for that because that creates a lot of extra work and confusion all i do is i create my roof repair custom post type i create my testimonials custom post type and then on each testimonial i can have a meta box basically uh for relationships to related to services so i can relate in the database a review to a specific service a specific review like bob to a specific service like roof repair and then on the roof repair page i can query all of the reviews that are related to my custom post type it's amazing so powerful right so now from a user experience and from an seo standpoint when somebody comes to my roof repair page they're obviously interested in roof repair they see my testimonials they're only going to see roof repair testimonials so everybody talking about how great i am at roof repair is what they're going to see on the roof repair page versus seeing random testimonials now you can also say you know what on that roof repair page i want to only show my six latest reviews so that as i add reviews constantly people are always seeing fresh reviews and in fact i also want to randomize it so every time the page loads someone sing a different set of reviews you can do that when you use queries and custom post types you can't do that manually if you like added a manual grid of reviews you can't do all that cool stuff this is the value of creating custom post types for something like reviews and relating those reviews to other custom post types like services or products it's so so so powerful all right so that's reviews and testimonials number four team members team members all right so and we'll talk about how i've got all these related down here again in a second just as a review but pretty much every business has team members right don't go create an about page and put a manual team grid on your about page i want you to create a team member's custom post type i want you to load your team members sorry my eight-year-old is screaming uh this is this is what it's like working from home right so trying to create videos you got your family screaming and going you know chaos in the background my dog's scratching her ass on the floor i don't know what's i'm just trying to create a tutorial i'm just doing my best over here all right so team members custom post type that way you can create all your custom fields like a field for their headshot a field for their bio a field for their title a field for their whatever their social media accounts and then you can query all of that in in a repeater on the about page or on the team member about page you can also do fancy stuff like open their bio in a light box man it's like the the sky is the limit when you do this stuff the right way so team members always create a custom post type for team members and we'll talk about more on this actually right now locations locations if a business has more than one location create a location's custom post type and this would be specifically related to their google my business as well because you're going to create a page for each location and you also want to be able to query and sort and search by uh location you're going to need a custom post type for this very very powerful and then remember team members what if the business has team members that only work at specific locations well you can use bi-directional relationships to relate team members to specific locations so that way on the locations page let's say it's atlanta so they have an atlanta location and maybe a charlotte location and maybe a a a location in alabama or florida or what have you you're only showing team members for their specific location that they work at and it's like almost automatic like it requires nothing once you set up stuff prac correctly on the back end there's not a lot of work like think about doing that manually and keeping that updated and then think about your client adding more team members themselves do you have to go back and edit the locations page you have to go back and edit the about page no no no no when you use custom post types and repeaters everything works magically the client goes and adds a new team member chooses the location to relate them to the locations page updates automatically so their their bio now shows up on the locations page automatically inside the repeater and then on the about page where all of your team members are listed or in a team member directory or whatever they show up there automatically as well everything is searchable properly everything is categorized properly stop doing this stuff manually custom post types for locations custom post types for team members for reviews and testimonials for products for services let's come down here service areas service areas this is different from locations if you know seo you know already what i'm talking about but in seo you can have locations which are like physical address offices and then you can have service areas where we might serve an area and we want to rank there but we actually don't have an office there this is very common for service based businesses where you might have one office in a city but you serve all these surrounding areas and you need to be able to rank in them you create what are called service area pages different from location pages so we need a custom post type for service areas and then you can have all of your relationships as well think about this with that roofing company right where we have services i i've worked for numerous roofing companies not like i didn't work for them i'm like i they were my client that's what i'm trying to say so i have a number of roofing companies and have had a number of roofing companies over the years as clients well guess what sometimes they'll tell you you know what we do residential um roofing in these areas but in these other areas we do residential and commercial but it's effectively like we don't do commercial in these certain areas and so you're faced with like this big conundrum of so when we have service area pages one we're going to create a template for this right so this is all going to be driven by custom fields so you have to be able to say well how do we show certain services on on inside this template and but not others that all happens with the relationships all right and you're in the way that you're building your queries again i don't want to get too technical but you need to have a service areas custom post type and a services custom post type enabled in order to create the relationships between them in order to create the queries properly inside the templates if you're freaking out right now and you're like oh my god my head is spinning i this is so technical it's once you understand the game plan like it's really not that technical and once you've built it once or twice it's really not that technical so just subscribe to the channel all right let's just pause for a second hit the subscribe button hit the bell drop a comment be like this is awesome or this sucks or whatever you want to say and that'll make sure that when i create future videos on deeper dives into this stuff you you see them and you learn more right and you'll figure all this stuff out as we go all right moving on faqs faqs makes sense right just like testimonials and stuff you and reviews faqs create a custom post type for faqs what does this do for you you can query faqs on specific pages remember our roof repair page we we only want to show faqs related to roof repair easy done with a repeater right and relationship so we relate an faq to a specific type of service we might have faqs related to service areas right it's unique to a service area or unique to a location cool one and done i have my faqs custom post type i have my relationships i can also create faq categories that people can sort through and search through i can so i can create on my repeater i can add filters to my repeater right this is again getting a little bit more technical but i can allow people to sort faqs by category or any other you know whatever whatever kind of sorting and filtering i want to be able to apply i can do that with any of these right if you want to be able to sort through services sort through products whatever you can do that when you use custom post types but faqs super beneficial for custom post type all right nut number eight is freebies so for all of you doing content marketing for your clients if you're going to be creating freebies downloadables where you're collecting you know an email address a name whatever you're getting people into the funnel it's really cool to use custom post types to organize your freebie so they stay out of your pages they stay out of your post they have their own separate database house so to speak and uh you can query them on certain pages you can again create relationships if you had for some reason like a roof repair freebie you could query that onto the roof repair page probably that's not a great example because you could just do that manually because there's really only one of them but i would highly highly highly recommend you create a freebies custom post type a really good use case for this would be creating a template for your freebies where when you want to create a new freebie page all you do is fill out some fields hit publish and you're done you don't have to create a whole new page inside of oxygen you can just apply a template with maybe a video or a custom image like a featured image and you can put the download link or you can put the form or whatever all done through advanced custom fields all right number nine huge huge huge if you have a client that's doing courses and trainings now this would mainly be for sales pages for your courses and trainings if you're using something like member press or you know another membership plug-in member mouse or whatever they're probably going to have this like you're going to build this in through their software but if you're using what i tend to do because i prefer maximum control i use wp fusion which has membership functionality in it but it's not a membership plug-in so you actually do a lot of stuff manually when you're using wp fusion so i would create a custom post type for courses and trainings and then you can create them all nice and hierarchical you can even put the sales pages in there so like i used to sell something called freedom business bootcamp right so i'd have freedom business boot camp as the main post and then under that that would be the sales page under that would be like the members area and then under that would be uh the module and then under that would be a lesson right and so it's all in a hierarchy inside of a custom post type and then you can control access to you know it's just i know it's it's a lot to think about just letting you know number nine courses and trainings for your custom post types all right last but not least events this is another one that you're going to see often right clients businesses they have events from time to time these might be offline events they might be online events like webinars doesn't really matter because again you can categorize them you can create relationships between them what if you're doing events at specific locations you're going to want the custom post types so you can have bi-directional relationships right so you should be getting the point by now all right so we're going to do a quick review overview and i'm going to share this um this jamboard with you because you're going to want to come in and just get a refresher a reminder maybe save this for yourself and you're also going to want to see the some of the relationships that i've shown like services are related to reviews and testimonials products are related to reviews and testimonials locations can be related to reviews and testimonials team members might be related to locations team members might be related to service areas service areas are obviously related to specific services faqs can be related to courses and trainings or to events or to whatever so you're going to see all the relationships here you're going to see the top 10 uses for custom post types you'll get a little bit of a reminder on why we're doing all of this and then how we're doing this i showed you a little bit of creating custom post types i would recommend you do some experimentation but i'm going to be doing deeper dives so in order to make sure you don't miss a deeper dive again i'm going to remind you it's your fault if you don't do it hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell hit the thumbs up drop a little comment let me know if this stuff is helpful let me know if this is confusing if you need me to clarify anything i try to respond to every single comment so don't say hey yeah i would leave a comment but he's probably never going to answer it no i will answer it i promise so drop your comment below if there's any clarification needed any questions needed and just know i'm going to be doing stuff in the future we're going to learn how to use repeaters together we're going to learn how to how to do the bi-directional relationships together i've actually been contemplating drop a comment below if you would be interested in a premium deep dive training on mastering repeaters in oxygen if that would be of use to you drop a comment below because i've been contemplating that as a premium training all right so that's it for today love you guys thank you for tuning in thank you for watching all the way to the end i'll be back very soon with another great video on either oxygen or just running a badass digital agency peace

Channel: Digital Ambition

Views: 5,667

Keywords: custom post types, CPT, wordpress CPT, wordpress post types

Id: GhcarpZxuNk

Length: 38min 28sec (2308 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021