I'm working on a new content type. Let's call it hotel rooms (it is not but the similarities are good enough).

Now, for each room, I will have a title and a description but I will also have a lot of metadata - beds, sea view, room number, size, summer price, winter price, and so on.

I would like my custom type to work on any theme. That means I need to provide a way to layout the post for index.php, single.php, and so forth. Obviously, presenting metadata is a large part of this.

How do I do this?

I'm working on a new content type. Let's call it hotel rooms (it is not but the similarities are good enough).

Now, for each room, I will have a title and a description but I will also have a lot of metadata - beds, sea view, room number, size, summer price, winter price, and so on.

I would like my custom type to work on any theme. That means I need to provide a way to layout the post for index.php, single.php, and so forth. Obviously, presenting metadata is a large part of this.

How do I do this?

• custom-post-types
• loop

2 Answers 2

I assume that you're making your custom post type in a plugin if you mean for it to work with any theme.

In that case, I would suggest building your templates in your plugin, and call all your meta data there.

Example:

/* Filter the single_template with our custom function*/
add_filter('single_template', 'my_custom_template');

function my_custom_template($single) {

    global $post;

    /* Checks for single template by post type */
    if ( $post->post_type == 'POST TYPE NAME' ) {
        if ( file_exists( PLUGIN_PATH . '/Custom_File.php' ) ) {
            return PLUGIN_PATH . '/Custom_File.php';
        }
    }

    return $single;

}

You can refine that further and add a function to check to see if the theme has single-yourposttype.php and to use that one if it exists instead of your plugin version, allowing for easy overrides by developers. Example:

    $themeurl  = get_theme_file_path("/single-yourposttype.php");
    $pluginurl = plugin_dir_path( dirname( __FILE__ ) ) . 'single-yourposttype.php';

    if( file_exists( $themeurl ) ) {
        include( $themeurl );
    } elseif( file_exists( $pluginurl ) ) {

        require "$pluginurl";
    }

I hope that helps.

I'd suggest to not add layout, but MarkUp and offer an option to override it. The best way to do this would be to add to a hook that your users can add to their themes templates.

// Theme template file
do_action( 'hotel_rooms' );

// Your plugin hooks in there:
add_action( 'hotel_rooms', 'callback' );
function callback() {
    echo "I am displaying details about a hotel room";
}

You could also make this a two step process to offer more refined control:

// Themes template or another (child?) plugin
// [] is an array and the default.
$data = add_filter( 'hotel_room_data', [] );

// Plugin
apply_filters( 'hotel_room_data', …etc. );

Two stepped: Eat your own dog food and apply the filter to your own loops and MarkUp as well.

add_action( 'hotel_rooms', 'callback' );
function callback() {
    $data = apply_filters( 'hotel_room_data', …etc. );
    foreach ( $data as $room ) {
        print $room['size'];
    }
}