Relationship Best Practices

While there is no specifically right and wrong way, you’d have to think about if you needed to store more information about the Series or Guests. If you’re collecting more details about them, they aren’t really Taxonomies, they’re related to your Episodes. The Taxonomy is the way you’re referring to being able to link your Guests & Series through the Associated Taxonomy type. If you’re doing a Taxonomy, it’s not recommended to also do a ‘relationship’ on that taxonomy through the related field method. The Bidirectional Field way is better if you’re doing multiple pods related to each other.

If you’re wanting to display the Pods in PHP, you’re wanting to write a WordPress Theme Template using the WordPress Theme hierarchy. That’s the preferred way for using PHP in your Templates. However, if you’re only doing related pods, you can check out the Frontier beta and it will give you a little more ‘oomph’ to your relationships, magic tags and conditional structures in the PHP Templates.

https://github.com/pods-framework/pods-frontier

I’m not sure if that answered your question, but if you need something more specific, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thanks Jim! i do have some follow up questions. I’m pretty sure I can do the template hierarchy part, I’m more concerned with getting some loops right on the homepage. Right now, this is all locally on my machine, and I do have Pods Frontier, but my issue with that is that my development partner would like to keep it version controlled, and that might not be the best set up for it. I could be wrong though.

So when it come to series and guests, are you saying they should be custom post types? Ideally I’d like to have relationships between series and episodes, and be able to display a guests’ appearances on their own page.

Yep, based on what you’re discussing, Episodes would belong to ‘Series’ (ie a custom post type called Series would have multiple Episodes assigned to it.), Guests could honestly be in multiple different episodes, but there’s only one guest. If you need to collect more data about the guest other than just the bio (Taxonomy description), you’re better off creating a Custom Post Type of Guests and creating a relationship from Episodes to Guest where you can ‘multi select’ the Guests. I’d make it bi-directional and create a field on the Guest side called ‘episodes_rel’ and make that multi-as well, then you can pull a report of Guests and their Guest Appearances or Episodes and link to the Guests.

Hope that made sense.

Totally get the issue on Frontier being in Beta. You can do this within the Theme Template files (episodes-archive.php, episode-single.php, etc.), but you’ll need to use the looping through Relationship fields tutorial linked here:

https://pods.io/tutorials/get-values-from-a-custom-relationship-field/

Well, there would be multiple guests in many episodes. The taxonomy pods do allow for pictures and other fields, but I suppose full custom post types would be straightforward. I noticed that Nerdist has series as a taxonomy.

You can definitely do this with Custom Taxonomy, especially if you’re doing WordPress theme templates with PHP. The issue comes in when you add additional fields to the Custom Taxonomy, or at least some folks have noted issues with adding additional fields to the Custom Taxonomy. That’s why I was recommending just relating multiple custom post types together.

The Nerdist definitely looks to be managing their series with Taxonomy and you can, too, but there’s a lot of additional details there that would make managing it at the taxonomy level somewhat problematic, especially if you decided to move it. Adding additional fields to a Custom Taxonomy requires Table Storage to be turned on, because that’s not stored in the default WordPress table structure.

They might be handling the additional images and details in different ways; that’s the beauty of WordPress, it’s very flexible and there’s no specifically right way to do something.

Hey, sorry for the long delay update, but I was wondering about, having switched over to all custom post types, showing the relationship in the admin area, so end users can see episodes related to a series more easily, and querying RSS by series and podcast episode.

Hey there, it doesn’t look like you actually gave your question above: could you be more specific about what you were wondering?

Sorry, I did kind of hurriedly write this one down.

Basically, my problems are:

1) I need to be able to have individual RSS feeds of episodes for each series, and I’m not sure how to find that.

2) There’s no way I can find to sort Podcast Episodes in the admin area by which series they’re associated with. This installation needs to be straightforward for the people who are going to be uploading episodes on a daily basis.

So far, these things seem like they would be more easily achieved with guests and series as taxonomy, but I’m probably missing something.