Topic Tag: Setting up custom taxonomy

Problem:

The issue here is that the user wanted to know the difference between a taxonomy and a custom post type.

Solution:

The taxonomies are meant to categorise your custom posts. The custom post types are meant to hold the actual information of the posts.

In order words when you want to create a post that will have a title, content, image, custom fields etc you will do this under a custom post type.

Lets say you have a having a book catalogue website.

You will create a Custom Post Type called book, which will hold the book title, the description and then the featured image will be the cover of the book.

Now how a taxonomy comes in is that it allows you to categorise the books. This can either be Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction etc.

Problem:
How to delete unused taxonomy terms?

Solution:
The UI for managing taxonomy terms is found next to the post type to which they are assigned.

So in the WP dashboard, the link to the page to manage the taxonomy is found as a sub-menu item for the custom post type(s) to which it is assigned.

From that page you can add but also delete terms of that taxonomy.

Problem: I am unable to select post types in the custom taxonomy editor screen, so I cannot associate the custom taxonomy with any post types. I am also unable to see the "Options" settings, and it looks like the page is incomplete. An error is shown in the logs:

[11-Sep-2018 15:45:53 UTC] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mb_strtolower() in /path/to/wp-content/plugins/types/vendor/toolset/types/includes/classes/class.types.admin.page.php:708

Solution: Ask your site's hosting team to install and activate the Multibyte String (mbstring) extension for PHP. This extension is required for Toolset.

Relevant Documentation:
https://toolset.com/toolset-requirements/