Today I wanted to walk you through using the Custom Press plugin for WordPress.  Now for those of you who aren’t or have little to no interest in coding, relax, and don’t break out into a cold sweat this isn’t going to be one of “those” articles.  Custom Press is a Plugin that allows you to customize WordPress Post Types (meaning what we would normally call “posts” and/or “pages” in WordPress) so that you can customize to your heart’s content.  It also gives you plenty of control over taxonomies (meaning categories for your custom post types).

Let’s dive into how you can first of all create custom post types and taxonomies so that you can use them in your site and also how you can embed them once you’ve created them.  Sit back and enjoy the screenshots.  Once you’ve done the hard work of installing the plugin (and by the way its not hard at all)  the next thing to do is to find it and configure it.  Most plugins that you install create their own heading in your WordPress backend dashboard however Custom Press doesn’t.  It creates the sections for Post Type and Taxonomies under the “Appearance” section for your theme as you can see below.

Step 1: Creating a Custom Post Type

Creating a custom post type is not that hard using Custom Press.  Click on the “Post Type” option and you will be taken to a page like this…

From here enter the name using a standard naming convention, the plural and singular label of the post type and a description about the post type and click “Save“.  What you will notice after saving your custom post type is that you will have an option in your left side navigation menu representing your newly created custom post type just like what you see below.

When you click the “Add New” option from the menu you’ll be brought to a page that looks a lot like the standard post and page post types with a few exceptions including the fact that the name is related to the customer post type that you created.

Step 2: Creating Taxonomies

Taxonomies are important for creating your custom post types in that they outline the categorization of your custom post types.  For example, if you create your custom post type called “Books” using Taxonomies you can outline genres, price points, authors and languages using a taxonomy structure.  The best way to think of taxonomies is to think of it like a category, something I am sure we are all familiar with and use it that way.  Let’s have a look at setting up taxonomies.

As you can see above all you need to do is set the taxonomy name, singular and plural labels and select the post type you want to apply it to whether its a standard post type like a page or post or a custom post type like we talked about previously.

Once you’ve saved your taxonomies you can start to use them in your post types to build out your hierarchy.  Lastly I wanted to show you just how to embed these custom post types and taxonomies into your WordPress website.

Step 3: Embedding your custom post types and taxonomies into themes and plugins

The real magic behind using Custom Press is the fact that you can take the post types and taxonomies and start to include them into your website.  In order to embed the post type or taxonomy you’ve created into your website in any custom manner you need to hover it first.

When you click “Embed Code” you’ll notice that it generates code which you can then embed into the functions.php file of your WordPress theme.

Now that I’ve  shown you how you can customize WordPress using custom post types and taxonomies I urge you to check out the Custom Press plugin to customize your WordPress website.