Jim,
Thank you for getting back to me. I did want to note that the WordImpress article link did not work for me. It redirected to their home page.
Something I didn’t mention in my first post was that I originally intended to use the [pods view="includes/awesome-list.php"] shortcode because it provides the greatest flexibility with the various page building plugins out there.
I began to transition my thinking to category templates because I figured that would create the greatest flexibility for the site.
Ultimately, as with all things, my answer lied somewhere in the middle.
I ended up creating custom post types for Food, Beer and Wine each with their own custom taxonomy. In this way, I could still allow the client to use category selections to organize the content and I was able to create a custom templates for each of the custom post types and use the shortcode to display the lists on a page.
Here is an example of one of the include files called “food-list.php”
<div id="menu-container">
<?php
// get the terms from menu taxonomy associated with custom post type
$custom_terms = get_terms('menu');
// loop through the category to get each term
foreach($custom_terms as $custom_term) {
wp_reset_query();
$args = array('post_type' => 'food',
'tax_query' => array(
array(
'taxonomy' => 'menu',
'field' => 'slug',
'terms' => $custom_term->slug,
),
),
);
$loop = new WP_Query($args);
if($loop->have_posts()) {
// define variables
// category term
$term = $custom_term->name;
// css string conversion
$str = $term;
$cat_description = $custom_term->description;
?>
<h2 class="menu-section"><?php echo $term ?></h2>
<?php
if (!empty( $cat_description )) { ?>
<p class="category-description <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($str)); ?>-description"><?php echo $cat_description; ?></p>
<?php } else {
//no description. do nothing.
} ?>
<ul class="menu-list <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($str)); ?>-menu-list">
<?php
// Loop through each term to get the posts
while($loop->have_posts()) : $loop->the_post();
//define variables
$title = get_the_title();
$price = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'price', true);
//check for a description
$description = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true );
//css title string conversion
$titlestr = $title
?>
<li class="menu-item <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($str)); ?>-menu-item">
<p class="item-title <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($str)); ?>-item-title <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($titlestr)); ?>-title"><?php echo $title ?></p>
<?php
if (!empty( $description )) { ?>
<p class="item-description <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($str)); ?>-item-description <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($titlestr)); ?>-item-description"> <?php echo $description ?> </p>
<?php } else {
// no description. do nothing.
} ?>
<p class="item-price <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($str)); ?>-item-price <?php echo str_replace(' ', '-', strtolower($titlestr)); ?>-item-price"><?php echo $price ?></p>
</li>
<?php endwhile;?>
</ul>
<?php }
}
?>
</div><!--/#menu-container-->
As you can see, this isn’t really a category template. Instead the custom term frames the loop that then pulls my PODS fields. This allows me to display posts under their term.
Some gotchas that I still haven’t completely ironed out:
- Displaying only the children of a parent category in the template above doesn’t work. I ended up having to use css to fix the bug.
- In another template I had to create an if/then statement for currency because, for some reason, if I left a PODS currency field blank (i.e. a particular wine is sold by the bottle but not by the glass) it would auto-populate 0.00 so I was unable to use if(!empty( $price )).
For now, I got it to work! I’ll keep refining to see how else I can make this better. I really hopes this helps somebody in the future.
-Richard
