Are you trying to have a custom area in your WordPress website on the navigation area? That’s called a Custom Post Type. Kori Ashton teaches you how to build one using the plugin Custom Post Type UI. It’s a free plugin that easily builds out this custom area for you inside of your dashboard.
Custom Post Type UI Plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/
Kori’s T-Shirt – https://barbacoapparel.com/
Great WordPress Hosting and Support – https://www.liquidweb.com/products/managed-wordpress/
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton in beautiful San Antonio, Texas and today we’re gonna be talking about custom post types.
So, let’s say you wanna build something on your website and use the power of the blogging area that allows for category, and archives. We wanna use that, harness that power. How do you do it? Let’s say that you wanna have a whole section of press releases and you don’t necessarily want that living inside of your blog. Maybe you want an entire section of products because you just want an online catalog and you don’t wanna be using that blog area because you actually also have a blog area.
Let’s look, today, at how to do that with a free solution that I’m gonna show you right now how to plug in and get a whole custom post type running inside of your WordPress website.
Hey, for those of you interested in my health journey be sure to stick around. I’ll give you a quick update at the end of all of this, and if you like my t-shirt this is from Barbacoa Apparel. I’ll give you a link below where you can check out all of the different San Antonio inspired t-shirts.
All right, so you really just need to dream big about how to use this really cool tool I’m about to show you. You can have a whole section over here, anything you want that lives right down below me here inside of this navigation area. So, if your client says, “Hey, I wanna list out a catalog “on my website of different types of products “but I don’t want people to be able to check out.” You don’t really need to get WooCommerce to do that necessarily. You can do that using a custom post type. Or if there’s anything you’d like to separate out into it’s own little box or area, inside of your dashboard you can do that down here in this section that lives below my picture here. You can do that with this tool that I’m gonna show you right now.
It is called Custom Post Type UI. That’s the plugin, it’s by WebDev Studios. As of today, everybody knows if you’re viewing my channel I always suggest that you make certain that they’ve updated recently, that it’s compatible with the version PHP you’re running as well as the version WordPress Core that you’re running. You always wanna be sure that it has a lot of active installs and has really great ratings. So, be certain of those things. If you’re viewing this later on down, a couple of years from now, and you’re checking out this video, it still should be relevant, you still should be able to do this all on the budget of free and on my channel, we love that budget.
Plugin Installation
So, what we wanna do is just into your dashboard. We’re gonna go over to plugins and we’re gonna click Add New because we wanna add a new plugin. And remember that this is only really possible in the self-hosted version of WordPress.
If you’re trying to do this on wordpress.com you’re gonna run into some speed bumps, you’re gonna be unable to do this. So, self-hosted version, you’re gonna come over here to Search Plugins and we’re gonna search for custom post type, okay?
And we should find, remember, we’re looking specifically for this one, Custom Post Type UI. We want to make a custom post over here, right below me, inside of this navigation. And we’re gonna harness the power of the blog. So, again, just really phenomenal reviews, really phenomenal installs. We’re gonna click Install now. This might take your computer a little bit of time depending on what sort of Wi-Fi you’re running on but you should be able to click Install and then Activate.
Plugin Walk-Thru
I’m gonna walk you through step by step. And an example I’m gonna give you is, if you’re client wanted to have their own section of products to make an online category, that’s the example I’m gonna use today but, remember, get as creative as you possibly can with what I’m about to show you because you can do a lot with what I’m about to explain step by step.
So, let’s say they wanted to have an individual, they wanted to have these categories called interior doors and exterior doors. They wanna have individual products inside of this catalog. Flush doors, panel doors, whatever they wanna have inside of here. How would we do that? How would we accomplish that without using something like a WooCommerce solution? Because all we wanna do is just have a catalog and display them really cool. We would use this plugin.
Okay, now that that’s active, check out down below me here. Inside of your dashboard, now, you should have an area that says CPT UI, okay? That’s Custom Post Type UI. This is where we’re gonna go now to set up your first custom post type. I want you to pause for a second though and think about the fact that, if you’re gonna need categories, if you’re gonna need taxonomies, what are you gonna do in order to go ahead and put content into this space? So, stop for a second, and even on pen and paper map out how you wanna lay out things.
Specifically, for Steve’s doors, what I wanna do is create a custom post type called all doors. Inside of there, I want two categories, two major categories called interior doors and exterior doors and then inside of those, I’ll have the other categories, the child categories that live underneath there. So, interior doors would then have flush doors, panel doors, glass doors, bi-fold doors, okay?
I need you to get that game plan already in place because we’re about to go build that out right now inside of your website by creating those categories. I’m gonna do just a few so you can see the whole process and then you can spend time playing around and tinkering with yours. So, CPT UI, remember again, I wanna add one called all_doors and I want that to live over here on the left side of my navigation.
So, I’m gonna click, Add, Edit, Post Types. Okay, follow me along with this. This is where you wanna name that major category that’s gonna live over here. What do we want it to be over here on that left side? I’m gonna say All Doors. It’ll automatically adjust. Notice, it added in, you’re not allowed to have empty spaces so it added in an underscore. Plural, so doors, plural. And then singular label. This is when a singular label is needed.
I want you to please read all the little fine print under each and every little box that’s on this page. That’s gonna help you help when I’m not on the screen. They really have really great documentation here. So, door, singular, and then we can describe this. We can describe this as, all doors in inventory. And then you’re just gonna go through each and every one of these. This is the menu name right here, All Doors. This is All Items. If you wanna go through this, you can. It’ll automatically take Doors up here at the top and plug it in for you, but it’s important that you spend time reading through each and every one of these.
I know it’s lengthy, but if you really wanna get custom and have some really great language in here, especially if you’re trying to build out something for recipes or anything that lives over here, a little community even, you want it to have different profiles over here. You can do that. You just need to read through each and every one of these and see what it is, and fill in the blank. And it gives you examples. Each and every one of these, it gives you really great examples.
The one thing I need to tell you to do though, if you want to have an archive section you need to come down here, scroll down for a little bit and we’re gonna have a section here that says Has Archive, and we wanna say, yes, if we want this to be able to build out those archive pages, right? The other thing is, if you wanna have categories, you see all these options, you guys. Don’t get overwhelmed by them, just read through each one, step by step, by step. But if you do wanna have categories and you do wanna have tags, go ahead and go through here and you can click what those are.
For now, I’m going to use only categories and we’re gonna use the WP Core, so, the WordPress Core solution for categories, okay? And I’m gonna click Add Post Type. Easily done, you see here at the top it says, “all_doors has been successfully added.” I look here on the left side, now check that out. We have a whole section now that lives here called All Doors. All Doors and Add New. So, if I click Add New, I get to come over here. I could’ve said Add new Door if I wanted to, see how it says that up here at the top? It went ahead and put that word in for me because that was the singular vocabulary word that we put in there.
So, Add title, this could just be Interior Flush Door – Ash, whatever we want there. You would add in any information you need to about the door. Come over here on the right side and you would find your category if you already had one. If you haven’t, you would add a new category and this would be Interior Doors, right? Interior Doors. And, Add New Category. This actually would be inside of those flush doors, remember? Because we had interior doors and inside of interior doors, we have flush doors. So, we would wanna add that to Flush Doors and then choose that parent category and say Add New Category, easily done. Featured Image, you can come here and add in a featured image of the door, put in the full description of the door, whatever you would like to do to build out this product page that’s what you do here in this moment.
Using Divi, the thing theme that I’m using, you can activate Divi on these custom post types as well. I’ll show you how to do that at the end of this because, notice, I don’t have the builder right here for Divi, yet that’s the theme I’m working on. There’s one extra step if you’re using a theme and you’re gonna try to use that page builder on these product pages or on these custom post type pages. There’s one extra step you’ll need to do. I’ll show you that toward the end.
But you can also come over here to the Categories section and build out your categories, easily, right in this space. Notice, it’s gonna go ahead and pull all of my WordPress Core. So, this is everything else that I have inside of my catalog for my categories inside of my regular post area.
If by some chance you need to edit what you’ve already done and how you maybe set it up, what your options were inside of a custom post type, you can do that. So, don’t worry about running across something that might be a little funky, you can always come back. Let me show you how to do that. You’ll come down here CPT UI and what I want you to do is say add, or, see, this has an option to edit the post type, okay? We can edit it.
We’re gonna go into this screen and up at the top, there are some tabs that live right here. It says Edit Post Types. So, if you have a lot of post types you’ve created over here you’d have a drop-down option here that you can select which one you wanna edit. We only have one called Doors right now. There it is, this is where it lives. And maybe we don’t like the fact that it’s using the categories for the blog area.
Maybe we want it to just use a different section for categories. Check this out. Let’s just scroll down. We’re gonna scroll down to that area. Remember, it was toward the end, all the way toward the bottom. Again, you see the option, remember? To use the WP Core.
Let’s go ahead and change it right now. Uncheck WP Core, change it to regular Categories and we’re gonna click Save Post Type. So, that completely changed it. So, now when we go back to the all doors area and we check out Categories now. Any other custom post type that lives there that has categories would be here, instead of pulling all the categories from your blog. Kinda cool, right? So, no panic here, you can always come back in and make edits.
Divi Builder Settings
All right, if you’re using the Divi builder and you want to tell it to please be applicable to all of those custom post type pages that we’re building out. You’re gonna go to Divi, you’re gonna go to Theme Options, and inside of here there’s one little area, you just have to turn on the little toggle bar and then that’ll allow you to then go into your custom post type and have access to the Divi builder or any page builder, for that matter, and you’ll be able to drag and drop, make a page template, easily done for all of these.
So, on this theme options page, you’re gonna go to Builder and it says enable the Divi builder on post types. Which post type? Well, now we just made a new one called Doors. So, we wanna enable it and click Save Changes. So, that when we go into All Doors now, I’m gonna go back and just show you what it looks like, so you can see how it’s activated, I would be able to make that template if I wanted to and then apply that template to every single one of my custom post type pages here. Really easily done, and now you see here that Divi builder is now available in this space.
Y’all, this is just a matter of getting really creative with how you use this to make a custom area inside of your navigation for your WordPress website.
Research If Needed
A lot of your clients, if you’re a freelancer, a lot of your clients are gonna love that you’re able to section them out like that. Tinker and play around. This custom post type plugin has phenomenal support and documentation. So, if this video isn’t enough for you just do another Google search for Custom Post Type UI plugin and you’re gonna find their support forum, you’re gonna find their amazing documentation to help you, step by step, walk through this and really use it to its fullest capabilities. I hope this has helped, y’all.
Stick around, I’ll talk a little bit about my health journey. If not, I’ll catch y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Have a great one, bye, y’all.
Health Update
Hey, y’all, thanks for sticking around still, those of you who are following my health journey. I know this is a little bit of a longer video so maybe you skipped ahead to come check this out. Thank you for doing that. That shows me how much you care and I really value all of your tweets, all of your comments on the videos here, all of your encouraging words to me, all of your prayers and support.
It’s been a long road. July 1st, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, so I’ve been going through radiation and chemo. I just finished up my last round of chemo. So, they’ve done all of the external radiation they can do for me, and all the chemo they can do for me right now. So, we’re gonna pause for a minute in my treatment. We’re gonna look at a couple of options because, unfortunately, the tumor hasn’t shrunk as much as we had hoped it had. So, I’m still dealing with a very large tumor and we’re fighting against it.
So, again, thank you for all your prayers and support. If you would, please keep me in your prayers, keep me in your thoughts as I fight this to become a survivor of cervical cancer. Hopefully, in the next couples of weeks I’ll have some really positive information for you as we’re working with a couple of other doctors to see what the options are moving forward. I’m not giving up. We will figure this out.
All right, y’all, keep smiling, keep looking up. I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday, bye, everyone.
