Ideas for Organising very specific Custom Content in wordpress

Question

Hi, I am already very confused as I am typing this thread out. Please forgive me if my query is a little too difficult to understand.

I have an existing Real Estate Site that I intend to move 100% into WordPress. The existing site has one backend for listings and another blog section for reviews.

You can probably see why I have decided to make the move to a full WordPress powered site. Maintaining both ends of the site is both tedious & cumbersome.

I have read and understood Custom Post Types & Custom Taxonomies and how they work. I am rather excited about implementing them. However there is some content I am finding difficult to organise.

* An existing database table of about 4,000 Condominium Projects

Each entry in the Condominiums table has some "bio-data" like Year Completed, No. of Units, Facilities, Amenities etc.

Currently each listing in my site has an ajax query that fetches information from this table on demand.

In the new site, I intend to have a link to the respective condominium in each property listing. This link should display information about the specific condo and display 'results' of matching listings.

Also, some condos have long article reviews done for them. In my current site, these reviews are displayed in the blog section. Separated altogether.

So here's my question.

How would I connect everything together. A duplicate perhaps? Taxonomy & Post for each condo? That will mean over 3,000 unique entries. Wouldn't that be an "overkill"?

If it is a taxonomy, the link will probably display all posts (listings) that have that condo name. But it wouldn't link to an actual page of either it's review or bio-data.

Any thoughts will be very much appreciated... Please feel free to ask if I have missed out any vital information!

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Would it work if you view the Condominiums as posts, and the reviews as comments to these posts? This would keep them together, and is conceptually not even too far from the original intention. You can put the extra information in custom fields and tags (which gives you free searching capabilities). Then you should see for yourself if you still need to create a custom post type, or just do it with regular posts (why not?).

But yes, you are stretching the original WordPress concept a little. Drupal or some other CMS might be a better option, and have more plugins that are suited to your situation.

Answer 2

The seems very straightforward to me and a perfect fit for WordPress (and I shudder to think of doing anything in Drupal you don't have too; and this from someone who developed in Drupal for 2+ years...)

Anyway:

• Each condo gets stored in a custom post type.

• All the "bio-data" gets stored in a custom field. Alternately you could create a taxonomy called "bio-data" and have a term value for each of the options but this won't work well for things like "SqFt" unless you do ranges (i.e. 1200sft-1300sqft) because terms can only be used for "true/false" attributes (i.e. either it applies or it doesn't) and not for specifics like exact offer prices, etc.

• The long articles can just be stored in the "content" section of the condo post type (unless you have multiple per condo then you can either store in comments as @Jan Fabry suggested or you can create a custom post type "review")

Like I said this is really straightforward. Of course I've lived and breathed database apps for 20+ years so it comes second nature to me. Any questions, just ask...

Answer 3

This was how I managed to solve my own question!, Ironically enough, MikeSchinkel had an almost identical answer, so I accepted his answer instead.. So here's what I have:

1. A Custom Post Type for Condominiums labelled 'Reviews' in the admin section. The property 'Bio-data' is in custom fields. This Custom Post Type has a rewrite rule:

   array( 'slug' => 'condominium' );  
   

   That way, I managed to have each Permalink to show something like:

   http://domain.com/condominium/post-title
   

2. I have added a page called 'Condominiums' and had it set to use a custom template - which basically shows the latest posts of condominiums with reviews. I also intend to extend the template for it to show a Search Condominiums function.

3. Added relevant taxonomies that can be searchable - like Brands & Developers.

4. I have already converted previous reviews to this. The last thing I will have to do will be to post all the Condominiums from the condominiums database to the wp_posts table using this Custom Post Type.

This is the part I am crossing my fingers for as I will have to see if the rewrite rules are going to significantly slow down my site as this will be 4,000 entries. This issue has been recently brought to my attention here

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12935

I will update this thread once I have completed the importing - since this is the only place I have posted a question and have it answered - if anyone might be interested!

Thank you for your suggestions. I hope this helps someone else who is in a similar predicament.