[Resolved] Relationships vs Post Reference

[Author]

Posts

[Ben]

What are the benefits of using Relationships to link posts over Post References and vice versa?

Is one way suited to doing a certain thing over another? And are there any specific limitations either way?

[Nigel]

Hi Ben

The comparison would be between a Post Reference field to connect two single posts, and a one-to-one Relationship to do the same.

Except, the Relationship is bi-directional, whereas the Post Reference field is uni-directional.

If you connect Left and Right posts together in a Relationship, the Left post knows which Right post it is connected to, and vice versa.

If you instead add a Post Reference field to a Left post to connect it to a Right post, the Left post knows which Right post it is connected to, but the Right knows nothing of the connection.

So when displaying the Left post, you would be able to output fields from the connected Right post, but not vice versa.

With a post Relationship, you could do either.

Relationships are stored in custom tables, whereas the post relationship is simply stored as post meta.

(See https://toolset.com/documentation/post-relationships/how-to-display-related-posts-with-toolset/using-post-reference-fields-to-display-information-from-a-related-post/)

[Ben]

Thank you for the reply and information Nigel.

I think Relationships are the way to go. They seem to do much more and seem to be easier if you were to want to expand features using Toolset in the future.