Hi Saul,
Thank you for contacting us.
Nigel will be away until Tuesday, but until then I'll be happy to assist you with your question.
Your understanding is correct and the first part of your message is related to how permalinks are handled in general by WordPress (and not Toolset plugins specifically). But we do our best to guide in the right direction, whenever possible.
As you noted, the functions "add_rewrite_rule" ( https://codex.wordpress.org/Rewrite_API/add_rewrite_rule ) and "add_rewrite_tag" ( https://codex.wordpress.org/Rewrite_API/add_rewrite_tag ) togather should let you convert, this:
/catalog/spring_2019/?department=painting
Into:
/catalog/spring_2019/painting/
You'll find the examples and suggestions in the following resources, very relevant:
hidden link
https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/241325/change-query-string-to-pretty-permalink
For more detailed assistance and suggestions around WordPress' rewrite rules, you can post your question at the dedicated forums like:
https://wordpress.org/support/forums/
https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/
Moving on to the second part of your message, if the link "/catalog/spring_2019/?department=painting" is working, I'll assume that you already have a Toolset View or custom PHP template in place, which gets the value of the URL parameter "department" and treats it as a taxonomy term slug for the custom taxonomy "department".
After you've achieved the desired URL structure ( i.e. /catalog/spring_2019/painting/ ), you'll be able to retrieve the value "painting", by using the "get_query_var" function:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_query_var
>> Is there a way to connect the templates back to Toolset so I can use the graphical tools instead?
- The Toolset's content template can be assigned to single post type pages.
https://toolset.com/documentation/getting-started-with-toolset/create-templates-to-display-custom-posts/
But in your case, the list of departments and the list of courses in a department both are not a single post type.
To show them, you can assign a one content template to your single catalog page, which is indeed a custom post, and further create additional child content templates to show information about departments and courses.
It is possible to include or nest multiple content templates, within a main post content template, by using the "wpv-post-body" shortcode:
https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/views-shortcodes/#vf-153372
Tip: you can also create a custom shortcode, that checks that whether only catalog page is being viewed ( e.g. hidden link ) or if its a department list page ( e.g. hidden link ) based on the value of "get_query_var".
That custom shortcode can then be used with condtional code blocks, to show/hide nested content template(s) accordingly:
https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/conditional-html-output-in-views/
I hope this helps and please let me know if you need any further assistance around this.
regards,
Waqar
