Taxonomy term management in Wordpress - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Taxonomy Term Management in WordPress

📖 Scenario: You are building a WordPress plugin that manages custom taxonomy terms for a blog. You want to create, configure, and display taxonomy terms programmatically.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple WordPress plugin that registers a custom taxonomy, adds terms to it, and displays those terms on a page.

📋 What You'll Learn

Register a custom taxonomy called genre for posts

Add three terms: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Biography

Retrieve and display all terms of the genre taxonomy

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Managing custom categories or tags for posts helps organize content clearly for readers and site admins.

💼 Career

WordPress developers often need to create and manage taxonomies to customize content classification and improve site navigation.

1

Register the custom taxonomy genre

Write code to register a custom taxonomy called genre for the post post type using register_taxonomy. Use the labels 'Genres' for plural and 'Genre' for singular. Place this code inside a function called register_genre_taxonomy and hook it to init action.

Wordpress

<?php
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use register_taxonomy inside a function hooked to init.

2

Add terms Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Biography

Create a function called add_genre_terms that adds the terms Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Biography to the genre taxonomy using wp_insert_term. Hook this function to init with priority 20.

Wordpress

 'Genres',
        'singular_name' => 'Genre'
    );
    register_taxonomy('genre', 'post', array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'hierarchical' => true
    ));
}
add_action('init', 'register_genre_taxonomy');

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use wp_insert_term inside a function hooked to init with priority 20.

3

Retrieve all terms from genre taxonomy

Write a function called get_all_genre_terms that uses get_terms to retrieve all terms from the genre taxonomy. Store the result in a variable called $terms.

Wordpress

 'Genres',
        'singular_name' => 'Genre'
    );
    register_taxonomy('genre', 'post', array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'hierarchical' => true
    ));
}
add_action('init', 'register_genre_taxonomy');

function add_genre_terms() {
    wp_insert_term('Fiction', 'genre');
    wp_insert_term('Non-Fiction', 'genre');
    wp_insert_term('Biography', 'genre');
}
add_action('init', 'add_genre_terms', 20);

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use get_terms with taxonomy set to genre and hide_empty set to false.

4

Display all genre terms on a page

Create a shortcode function called display_genre_terms that calls get_all_genre_terms, loops through the terms, and returns an unordered list (<ul>) of term names. Register this shortcode with the tag show_genres.

Wordpress

 'Genres',
        'singular_name' => 'Genre'
    );
    register_taxonomy('genre', 'post', array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'hierarchical' => true
    ));
}
add_action('init', 'register_genre_taxonomy');

function add_genre_terms() {
    wp_insert_term('Fiction', 'genre');
    wp_insert_term('Non-Fiction', 'genre');
    wp_insert_term('Biography', 'genre');
}
add_action('init', 'add_genre_terms', 20);

function get_all_genre_terms() {
    $terms = get_terms(array(
        'taxonomy' => 'genre',
        'hide_empty' => false
    ));
    return $terms;
}

// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a shortcode function that returns an unordered list of term names and register it with add_shortcode.