Custom Taxonomy – Issue

It would be useful to have a custom taxonomy, say “Issue”, so that posts can be associated with a particular “Issue” or “Edition” of the newspaper. Now the post can be in, say, category: “Sports” and in issue: “25” and effectively allow back-issue archives. And chance of adding this to a wishlist? This seems kind of obvious for a newspaper theme. (There would need to be filters for this custom taxonomy on any shortcode/VC-element that produces a list of posts, like the Block elements in Visual Composer.)

Had kind of the same question. Actually, on our old site, we had a custom taxonomy hack for both volume (year) and issue (week), with some theme integration. But I decided it wasn’t worth recreating when we moved. That information is mostly important for the print edition, so I just linked to PDFs of those from an archive page, and left it as simply posts by date range for those who want to see back issues online.

If they don’t decide to include this feature in the theme someday, there are a number of ways to make a custom taxonomy in WP – but having it well-integrated into the theme will be a bit of a headache if you’re not up on php.

I have a solution that is fairly elegant. For now I’ve used a tag for the issue, e.g. “Issue 25”, and that seems to work. For the Block VC Elements you can set both the tag (e.g. issue-25) and the category id (e.g. 15), which will target the correct posts. I’ve also added an “Issue Number:” metabox to the publish section on the post/page editor, and have a modified header.php to use it to show the issue number in the Masthead, and also the month and year from the publish-date field.

Sounds good. That’s probably what I would do if I were going to go to the trouble. Using a tag so that blocks can distinguish is something I hadn’t considered 🙂

Thanks Lucian. Brilliant job on the Newspaper theme – Excellent.

(Errata: Of course, it wasn’t header.php, it was the parts/header-xxxxxx.php files that I modified in the child theme) – The site is still being built but I’ll remove the maintenance splash page so you can see the mods in action – http://www.catalystmag.co.za

Also of note is that a “newspaper” doesn’t have monthly editions like a magazine, but is typically a daily, and WP has built in daily and monthly archive pages automatically.

For a magazine site, We did the same thing as others which was create a category called “editions” and then made sub-categories from that, such as Issue 01, Issue 02, etc. which were sub-categories of Editions (and so the hierarchical menus would work in sidebar).

Then we could also make a top menu of “back issues” which led to the most recent five issues, and then an “older” link. Then we created a single “page” which had shortcode to list all the categories from Editions as a UL lineup of the editions.

Just some more food for thought 🙂

Nice! Thanks Lucian.