Custom post archives are the standard method that WordPress uses to display custom content. We will show how to customize these archives using Toolset plugins, without writing PHP.

Introduction to WordPress Custom Post Archives

Custom Post Archives list your custom content. You probably already know the standard WordPress archives. A good example is the blog home, author pages, and search results. While the standard archives list the standard content types, custom post archives will list your custom content.

You can create individual templates for custom post archives. These templates can include any field. For example, let’s create a custom post type named “bios”, that hold biographies.

Bios custom post type in Types admin

The “bios” custom post archive will display a list of these biographies.

Accessing the post type archive URL

To easily manage custom post type archives; it is recommended that you use an appropriate permalink setting on your website.

  1. Login to your WordPress admin.
  2. Go to Settings → Permalinks.
  3. And under Common Settings, let’s use Post name.
  1. Then click Save Changes.
  2. Now open any custom post type in the browser. You should see the URL in the form of:
http://mywebsite.com/post-type/post-slug/

Example:

http://mywebsite.com/bios/mr-x/
  1. The archive URL of your custom post type takes the form of:
http://mywebsite.com/post-type/

So in the above example, it will be:

http://mywebsite.com/bios/

Toolset Types allows you to add links to your Custom Post Type Archive to your WordPress menus. First, make sure that your Custom Post Type is shown on the WordPress Menus editing page. Click on the Screen Options if it is hidden and tick the checkbox next to its name. In our example, we used the “Events” Custom Post Type:

Add Custom Post Type to the WP Menu editing page

To add the link to the Archive page of your Custom Post Type to your custom Menu:

  • Select it in the left-side menu by clicking on its name – it will expand with the list of posts it contains
  • Click on the View All tab
  • Check the first, All items option and click the Add to Menu button
Insert Custom Post Type Archive Page into a WP menu

That’s it, now you will see a new item called “All items” added to your menu. It will also feature a small description on the right side saying, for example, “Archive for Events”, where “Events” is the name of our Custom Post Type.

Customizing Custom Post Archives with WordPress Archives

Go to Toolset → Dashboard, locate the custom post type, for which you want to design the archive, and click on Create archive (or edit the archive if it already exists).

Creating an archive from the Toolset Dashboard

Now, proceed with the instructions for using WordPress Archives.

Change the Blog Archive title on your WordPress Archives

Your site’s theme is responsible for placing the heading (title) on your pages. Toolset Views is filling in the content part of the page.

If you want to change the Blog Archive title there are two options:

  1. If your theme provides it, set the theme option to turn off titles on archive pages. Then, you can add any custom heading using Toolset.
  2. Edit the theme’s archive.php file and remove the code that outputs that heading (title).

If you apply one of these changes, make sure your new heading (title) uses an H1 tag for the best SEO results.