Wordpress: custom post types: using custom fields or taxonomies?

Question

I'm thinking about using WP custom post types to create a basic real estate website.

The post type will be for property listings. I've decided to have one post type for For Sale and one for Rentals, simple because they have somewhat different property information.

A typical listing will need to specify some information, ie, is it a house, an apartment or maybe it's just a piece of land.

What are the pros and cons of specifying this info using custom fields (meta data) versus using taxonomy (categories and tags)?

I can see that it's easy to search based on taxonomy, but custom post types meta data can also be queried.

Also, it seems that this question applies to any post data where discrete choices are required: meta data checkbox, select or taxonomy.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Answer 1

My preference for what you're trying to do would be taxonomy for the following reasons:

SEO and User Friendly URLs

With categories and tags, WordPress permalinks are setup to put that information in the URL for you. This will go a long way towards the SEO and usability of your site because you'll be able to create URLs like:

http://yoursite.com/rentals
http://yoursite.com/for-sale/two-bedroom/123-fake-street

Hierarchy

I don't know if you have the need for it, but building a hierarchy with categories is easy. This will give you lots of flexibility when it comes to organizing your posts.

Theme Coding

As you said, it's possible to perform custom queries for meta data, but WordPress has many out-of-the-box functions to query and display based on tags and categories. This will mean that you'll have to write less code to get your theme to do what you want.