Different types of authors in Wordpress - Many authors

Question

This is a follow on to this question I posted some time ago.

I want to make a website about illustrated books. There are two different kind of authors for a book: writers and illustrators

For each writer I want to make a page that lists the books for that writer. The path would be:

• http://mysite.com/writers/EdgarAllanPoe
• http://mysite.com/writers/OscarWilde
• etc

The same for each illustrator: a page for each illustrator listing the books illustrated by her or him. Paths in this case would be:

• http://mysite.com/illustrators/DiegoRivera
• http://mysite.com/illustrators/FridaKahlo
• etc

and then, each book will have a single page (like a post):

• http://mysite.com/books/OneHundredYearsOfSolitude
• http://mysite.com/books/WinnieThePooh
• etc

The original question was: Is it possible to do this in Wordpress?

John P Bloch kindly recommended to use Wordpress' custom taxonomies. That's a good idea if the number of categories is small, but I am not sure what happens if the number of authors and illustrators are hundreds (or thousands). Would I have to go through an enormous dropdown list or checkbox list? Is there a limit on the number of elements in a taxonomy?

Please tell me if Wordpress is able to handle this.

Thanks

Answer 1

I would use the Wordpress More Types plugin and seperate illustrations and authors into separate types. It is very easy to use and combined with more fields and more taxonomies it gives you a lot of options.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-types/

From the More Types description:

More Types is a WordPress plugin that adds new post types to the WordPress admin. For instance if you run a music site you could create a review post type (based on post). If you run a food blog you could create a post type for recipes.

Answer 2

There is no limit to the number of items in your taxonomy. I myself have run sites with thousands upon thousands of categories, so taxonomies are definitely able to handle this.

The problem (which you would have no matter how you implement this) is getting this information to the user in a sane way. You can't just throw a dropdown or list of thousands of authors at a user. A few ideas I can think of for a sane way to present these taxonomies would be 'Popular', 'Most used' (as in, authors with the most books), or Alphabetically, listing 20 or so at a time. Also, you could implement a taxonomy based search.

Of course, if you're talking about from the site management perspective, I'd suggest using non-hierarchical taxonomies, since they'll give you the same interface that tags use (i.e. start typing and if it exists, you'll get pop-up suggestions).