Menu structure/hierarchies
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Hi,
I am trying to build a directory website that would have top-level categories such as ‘Things To Do’ and ‘Places To Go’. A sub-category under ‘Things To Do’
would be ‘Hiking’. The problem I am having is that the directory covers nine counties and I want to organize each sub-category by county. Though a little
cumbersome with regard to the aesthetics, I can live with having a nav-bar with the main categories, then a sub-menu on hover for the activity such as ‘hiking’ and
then a sub-sub-menu on hover for each of the nine counties under each activity. The problem comes on the backend where I have to create a separate page for nine counties
for what will be over 100 sub-menu items (hiking, fishing, ice-skating, wineries, camping, etc., etc). Each of the activities will have to have nine counties below it on the backend menu structure and unless I am thinking about it wrong I will have to create nine new pages, with the same nine county names for each activity.Ideally, I could have just one page for each activity with the listings arranged by county for all nine counties so if someone clicked on the nav-bar menu item for hiking they would be taken to a single page with all nine counties and individual listings for each county could be under that county’s heading. As I understand it, having the individual listing show up in a specific place on a page (i.e. under the correct county heading) is not easy and requires PHP coding, which I do not know how to do.
Assuming I cannot organize the website with all the listings for all nine counties for a specific category on a single page because I don’t know how to code in PHP,
is there a way to organize my hierarchy on the backend to avoid the problem described in my first paragraph of having to create over 900 county pages (9 counties times 100 specific activities, places to go, etc.) or is that just the nature of the beast of hierarchies and sub-menus?Thank you for any suggestions you can provide; I very much appreciate it.
-Steve
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What is the address of the site you are working on?
Sites hosted on WordPress.com do not allow PHP coding so I feel you might have a self-hosted site made with WordPress.org software.
If this is the case you should use the since this forum is for sites hosted on WordPress.com.
Now as an answer to your question (even though you may be on the wrong forum):
It is completely possible to have the sub-menu items link to a list of links organized by country simply with HTML. You could use the editor to do the links and titles too without knowing HTML.
For example:
<h1>Hiking</h1><h2>Canada</h2>
trails
riverfronts
back country<h2>Australia</h2>
trails
riverfronts
back country
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the code didn’t come out as I expected. I think the point is still made but let me know if it needs clarification.
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Hi AmyLynnLock,
You are right- I should have posted the question in the .org forum and I apologize for that- I am sure that is very annoying to members of this forum. I want to thank you for your reply and I will ask one more question/clarification and then stop taking up time/space on the wrong forum. The way I understand it, the difficulty and the part that needs PHP coding is to make an individual listing show up under the correct county heading on the page. I believe I first need to create a custom post type to have a listing with various fields such as address, hours of operation, text, etc. and then I have to get this custom post type to show up under the correct county heading on the single page that will have listings for, lets say restaurants, in nine different counties. Using a custom post type (perhaps there are other ways to do it?) I create a listing for a restaurant in County X, but how do I make that the listing for that restaurant show up under the heading for County X on a page that has eight other county headings? If that is what your previous answer accomplishes, I give you even more apologies and I will get out my HTML book and try to figure out how to do it using your suggestions. I am confused by your reference to using links to do it. I know I can create links that take you to a particular place on a page but how do I make a listing show up at a particular place. Obviously I don’t really know what I am doing so if I am misunderstanding even the most basic aspects of this, feel free to let me know and not bother to answer. Thanks again,
Steve -
I am happy to give the little input I have on this topic (and clarify my previous response).
That being, I am not a developer and do not know PHP. On the WordPress.org forum, there are many developers that freely share coding advice. My experience with custom post types comes from when I have ran a self-hosted book review WordPress website that used custom post types (my husband did all the coding so I got the benefits without the work).
My previous solution involved manually typing the links out each time a new listing is added. With WordPress.com this is probably a good solution (maybe the only one?), but with WordPress.org you have more options.
If you will be adding new listings often, custom post types allow the links to each listing to automatically be added to the correct category under the country. Which could be a real time saver. If this site does not often get new listings the time savings need to be weighed against the time to learn to code or the money to hire someone.
I found custom post types to be great for the ability to have specific information contained in the post to be used in complicated ways that would have to be done manually with regular post. For me, given it was a book review site, I gained the ability to list all books by a given author under the author’s page automatically and many other things like that. The ability to parse out certain information about a given post and pull it up elsewhere on the site can be really useful, but often it is unnecessary.
I believe a website should be as simple as possible without losing any functionality (both on the front-end as well in your workflow). I would make sure you need to get that complicated before you go down the PHP path.
Sorry I couldn’t confirm whether your PHP ideas are correct. I know you will have no troubles finding a brilliant developer to help with that on the WordPress.org forum.
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Thank you, AmyLynnLock for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. I will look into using custom post type plug-ins. -Steve
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