Custom Taxonomies and Fields Made Simple

In part 1 of this guide we covered custom post types — the key building block of any WordPress site that goes beyond simple blogging. But post types alone are rarely enough. Your custom content almost always needs to be categorised in some way, and it very often carries extra information — a price, a location, a duration — that you want to show in a structured way. That's exactly what custom taxonomies and custom fields are for.

Custom taxonomies, explained

The word taxonomy sounds academic, but you can simply think of it as a category type. You already know two taxonomies: blog Categories and Tags. Both exist to group posts in some way.

Need another way to group things — say, by colour? Then you create a new taxonomy called color and attach it to your post type. From then on, whenever you create an entry, you can assign a colour to it. Each individual value — red, green — is called a term of the color taxonomy.

Taxonomies come with a long list of settings, just like custom post types, but only two of them really matter when you're starting out:

• The link to a post type. A taxonomy is useless until you attach it to the right post type — you won't be able to use it or its terms anywhere until you do.
• Hierarchical or flat. The difference is easiest to see in the two taxonomies you already know: Categories are hierarchical, Tags are not.

To create a taxonomy you can use the same free tool we used for custom post types in part 1 — Custom Post Type UI. It gives you a simple form for creating and configuring taxonomies, no code involved.

Custom fields, explained

A custom field is a piece of extra, structured information you attach to a post type. Let's say you want to sell bicycles online:

1. Create the custom post type bicycle.
2. Create the custom taxonomy bicycle_type to categorise bicycles as Mountain, Road, Cruiser and so on.
3. Create a custom field like price to store — and display — what each bicycle costs.

At that point your shop is conceptually ready; all that's missing is a payment system. In practice most people reach for an all-in-one solution like WooCommerce — but you don't have to. Once you understand post types, taxonomies and fields, you understand how any structured WordPress site is built, including WooCommerce itself.

Custom fields are built into WordPress, but the raw built-in interface is bare-bones and few people enjoy using it. The de-facto standard is the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin — millions of active installs, and every WordPress developer knows it. It lets you define field groups with proper input types (text, number, image, date…) and attach them to your post types.

Master a CPT tool and ACF, and you can model the content of virtually any business — unlimited custom information, all without code.

The tricky part: displaying it all

Creating custom content is the easy half. Displaying it beautifully is where non-developers traditionally got stuck: themes can't know in advance what post types and fields you'll invent, so historically the answer was “learn PHP and write templates.”

If your site runs on Avada — the best-selling WordPress theme — that's exactly the gap our plugins close, visually, inside the Avada Builder:

• Custom Post Types, Taxonomies & Fields shows any custom post type in Avada's Blog, Portfolio and Recent Posts layouts — filtered by your taxonomies, with up to two taxonomies and two custom fields displayed per entry.
• Custom Field Element drops any single custom field value onto any page — with a label, an optional link and full design control. Works with native fields and basic ACF fields.

Back to Part 1 Custom Post Types Made Simple