Filtering data using Taxonomies

Resolved norte2017
(@norte2017)

7 years, 6 months ago

Hi,

As I’m setting an on line library, I followed the pod’s tutorial that was very helpful. But as I need to have a more detailed library, i needed to organize the information using several CPTs and taxonomies.

As the library is organized by CPTs corresponding to each publication type available (books, magazines, papers…), an author may have publications of more than one kind.

To allow visitors to search publications by type I’ve created also a custom taxonomy labeled “publications types”, with the several types of publications and a parent one labeled as “all publications types”.

I made a relationship between authors and the publications types, but to show all the publications of an author on its profile page, all the publications types must be filtered using a custom field for each publication type.

This is the code for my pod’s template for the author’s profile page:

{@biografia}

<h4>Publicações de {@post_title} em ArchTech®</h4>

Monografias:
 {@publicacoes_do_mesmo_autor_monografia}

Monografias com Editores:
 {@publicacoes_do_mesmo_autor_monografia_editores}

I tested it with two types of publications and it shows the publications titles of the author and leaves an empty field if no titles are available for a publication type, the titles links to each publication post.

It’s all working quite well, but there is an issue that I’m wondering if could be improved:
– Publications titles of an author must be selected manually on each publication type’s custom field, which takes a lot of time and may not be accurate, as some titles may be forgotten.

So, my question of you may help:
-Is it possible to create in the author profile’s pod a relationship between the publication type’s custom field, the publication type’s custom taxonomy and the author’s name to sort automatically the publication titles using the template code, instead of selecting it manually on each custom field?

Thanks on advance.
Rogerio

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

Plugin Contributor Jim True
(@jimtrue)

7 years, 6 months ago

Author’s profile is the ‘user’ which you can make an extended User Pod. You can set bidirectional relationships between publications and the user, yes.

Relationships aren’t to ‘specific’ fields: they are object to object, publication to author/user, book to author, etc. You’re not setting a relationship to a specific field in the object in question, so I’m a little confused by how you’ve setup your configuration.

It’s possible you’ve over-complicated your configuration. You could reasonably have ALL publications be in the same post-type and just differentiate ‘books, magazines, papers’ by taxonomy. That’s how you’d do that in a bibliography or card catalog. Most of the fields are identical through most publication types. Then you’re only creating one relationship from ‘author’ to ‘publication’ and just doing the grouping/sorting/filtering with taxonomies (which is what they’re best at).

Most of the configuration you’re doing depends on how you’re entering information. If you’re entering by ‘author’, yes, you’re going to have to enter all the publications one at a time for the author and you’re going to want to have all those available as you’re entering that author. If you’re entering by publications, it’s much easier to add the author if they’re not in the system at that time or just match them up if they are already input.

Also check to see that you’ve made the relationship field type in additional options as ‘List View’ which is a much more usable relationship field.

If you have a method of just doing an import, obviously that would be easier. Personally, I’d do a spreadsheet of all publications, add a ‘field’ for the author that I would match up later, add all your taxonomies so their terms are written or matched up during import with WP All Import and then just go through and fix the authors later or add all your authors at once, get their individual user id and use the CIO Custom Fields plugin to match up those single select authors by their user id.

Thread Starter norte2017
(@norte2017)

7 years, 6 months ago

Hi Jim,

thank you for your quick reply.

The website that I was talking about has a scientific target, so accuracy on publications information is quite relevant for the users.

Publications such as monographs, journals, conference proceedings, books chapters, conference papers, journals papers, phd thesis… have specific custom fields that shouldn’t appear as empty fields by using a general template. Thus, I’ve created specific post types for each type of publication to match a specific template that will show the relevant information about a publication in the most accurate way. A book uses an ISBN, a Journal uses an ISSN, for example. Makes no sense to show an empty ISBN field on a post about a Journal or a Journal article.

Information can be set using both ways, by entering the publication author or by entering the publication title on its publication type CPT and filling the proper custom fields.

Another thing that I’ve done was to create specific taxonomies corresponding certain custom fields, which really speeds the process of inserting data only by selecting the information available on each taxonomy. For example: publications years, editions numbers, publishers…

So, the real problem is to relate publications titles, types of publications and publications authors. It’s not a bi-directional relationship as I’ve made for publications titles and authors. It’s a more complex relationship.

From your explanation, what I’ve thought that could be made is not possible because taxonomies really act as a filter and not as an automatic way to retrieve the publications titles across the CPTs to have all publications titles of a certain type and of a certain author filtered in a custom field. That must be done manually by selecting the publications titles for each publication author, which I’ve done already.

This may appear to be complicated, but organizing information on a detailed level will allow the users to search publications by filtering them by year, publication type, author, publisher, scientific topic… or search it by typing a specific ISBN or a specific DOI for example. Even searching publications using conditional search. For that stage, I’ll use a filter plugin set as a sidebar widget.

Nevertheless, Pods is really a all in one plugin and it’s a quite easier way to manage and display complex and huge amounts of information.

Thanks.

Rogerio

Plugin Contributor Jim True
(@jimtrue)

7 years, 6 months ago

Where is it breaking down? In the publication search for particular authors? Is that happening after you’ve already input publications or when you’re inputting them from the author side of the process? Focusing on where your input will primarily be coming from is the best way to solve these kinds of issues. It might be easier, if it’s just linking up authors to their publications, to use a front end form that focuses on search and selection, posting to the authors record only after all the publications are “in the cart”.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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