Please do note that these are potentially a work in progress and require input from the content contributors, designers and anyone else involved in the process to make these as useful as they can possibly be!
Pre Defined Custom Post Types
A large part of the point of this framework is to provide explicit post types for the vast majority of the content of any Partner website. Currently, that includes Software Products, Sectors, Case Studies and Testimonials. There are further ‘sub post types’ for Software Features and Sector USPs, with their relationships already configured and attached, providing the ability to create very complex queries with little to no work. DO NOT disassociate sector USPs from sectors, nor Software Product Features from Software Products. If you wish to cull some of those USPs or features, simply unpublish them! There’s a ‘visibility’ toggle in the ‘Action’ column for that explicit purpose. If you go round orphaning stuff, it’ll be ten times harder to repair later, and you may get unexpected indexing and search results for orphaned content.
All custom post types are managed through the plugin Pods – Custom Content Types and Fields.
Again, the idea is that this provides custom fields for everything you should need to facilitate developing the site; the most important aspect being that you have your content in a standard format in a standard place, rather than pasting bits of text all over the place into widgets in some visual editor!
Over time, we’ll develop blocks and sections for Elementor for displaying each of these post types and its associated archive pages, and these can be saved as templates in the Elementor library so that we build up a library of pre-built drag and drop user interfaces.
Development of these custom post types into a useful framework is a work in progress and is going to take the input of all those involved in the project!
Pre Defined Taxonomies
In addition to creating the custom post types, I have created a matching taxonomy, and, to try and make things as simple as possible, written a function ‘post_auto_cat’ (in the theme function.php) which assigns specific default categories to the custom post types.
The categories mirror the post types and the structure of the site, which, strictly speaking are unnecessary, but afford us the greatest flexibility when collating and displaying content, particularly for archive pages or ‘block’ widgets using the default widgets in the visual editor, where you can conditionally display by category or tag, or in some cases via a custom field in a custom post type, sorted and displayed as required. For example, it’s trivial to do ‘related software’ to a sector, simply by tagging the software to the sector, then querying it as such. See the ‘Hospitality Sector’ archive view for a perfect example of that.
Pre Defined Global Custom Fields – Client Information
I have also defined a new page in the main WordPress Settings, titled Client Information, which you can insert into any widget, header, template etc as required. Always use them when you can for consistency. The benefits should be obvious! If, for example, they were to change their support telephone number, you would only need to change a single variable once to change it site wide. Moreover, it means as you build headers and footers and add the designs to the template libraries, you won’t even need to change the details next time you deploy it, because they will be entirely dynamic for the currently entered client.
‘Global’ custom fields currently include:
- Company Name – (slug is…) company_name
- Company Telephone Number – company_telephone_number
- Support Telephone Number – support_telephone_number
- Sales Enquiry Email Address – sales_enquiry_email
- Support Email Address – support_email
- About Us Summary – about_us_summary
To use them, you can use a pods shortcode or, in many of the Elementor widgets, simply select “Pods Field” and enter the slug of the field in the ‘Dynamic’ content entry.
e.g.: The currently configured Company Name: YN Payments
The ‘About Us’ summary for YN Payments reads:
And a very gratuitous example might be:
To contact sales, call us at (01423 227 487) or email us at info@ynpayments.com. For support, email us at info@ynpayments.com or call (01423 227 487).