I was extremely stoked to hear that wordpress 3.0 was bringing custom content post types into the mix. Which I guess were supported in 2.9 but I never really knew that, go figure. Anyways upon updating I was confused. Where is this custom post type management area I asked. Everything looked the same.

Upon googling the topic I soon realized it was not as easy as I imagined. While it was as easy as pasting some code from a tutorial. I really had no idea what I was pasting. So I gave it a few weeks and searched again and I found something helpful.

I found two plugins (not modules… drupal heh) that pretty much made it as painless as I imagined it being.

The first is the Custom Post Type UI plugin. It does just as the title would indicate: provides you with a UI for creating and managing your custom post types. It also provides a way for you to create and manage taxonomies for your custom post types.

The second is the Simple Custom Post Type Archives plugin. Now after I created a custom post type with the greatest of ease with the above plugin. When you create a custom post type (ie: albums) each album post would have the url: blah.com/albums/album-title. Naturally I thought if I went to blah.com/albums I would get a list of all the album post types. I was wrong and was left ponder how I would go about listing these of on a page in an aggregated fashion like a category page. I tried a few things and failed. After some searching around I found this plugin. It literally just does that. It makes so when you go to blah.com/albums you will get a list of all the album post types. Just install, enable and boom! It was that easy.

I wanted to get a tad bit fancy so I created a type.php which is the equivalent of category.php. It worked for me because I have only one custom post type but I think you can get more control if you use type-album.php (album being the name of your custom post type)

With all that said you may notice there is now an audio link in the main navigation and there is no longer an audio category. That’s right. The albums are all their own custom post type. So I guess kudos to wordpress, great work as always.