One of the best features of Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0 is the use of custom taxonomies. This is often overlooked, where the current focus has been on Custom Post Types, but is the feature that makes classifying content on your site and internal navigation far better than before.
What are Custom Taxonomies?
Taxonomies are used to arrange, classify and group things. The default Taxonomies in WordPress are tags and categories that WordPress is uses for posts. Now with WordPress 3.0, it is possible for developers to set up custom taxonomies to be used with their Custom Post Types.
We’ve used Custom Taxonomies to Create a seperate taxonomy for the directory page on DIY Trade News, a site where we are implementing Custom Post Types extensively.
Now, the Directories can be seperated by their own set of categories, Listings, that helps the user find related information on Directory entries.
WooThemes has been incorporating Custom Post Types in their new themes, such as Estate (for Property Listings) and Sealight. By far one of the most interesting uses of Custom Taxonomies is by WooThemes in their Estate theme.
Here at the bottom of the page you can see two seperate Tag or Taxonomy clouds, one for Property Location and one for Property Features. By utilizing Custom Taxonomies in this way in combination with a Custom Taxonomy cloud widget, the navigation within a site utilizing the Estate Theme will be far better and more pleasing to the user.
For more information, check out this Essential Guide to WordPress Custom Taxonomies
