[Resolved] Selective Import / Export Config, Post Fields, etc. & Pre-Configured Fields

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[GTD9219]

I have a couple questions and things I am trying to accomplish that are related.

1. Is it possible to selectively export / import things like certain Post Fields? I see a need to create post field groups + configurations and reuse them on multiple sites so I don't have to recreate the post field groups for every site.

2. Do you have any pre-configured fields that folks commonly use? For example, lists of states, countries, years, etc? This is somewhat related to question #1 because I definitely don't want to manually create these types of fields on every site!

[Nigel]

Hi there

Sorry for the late response. Please note that this community forum is intended for users of the free Types plugin, and we prioritise answering questions on the Technical Support forum for our paid subscribers, and I recommend you post your questions there in future.

Now, turning to your questions:

1. We have an additional plugin called Module Manager where you can bundle together commonly-used elements and export them from one site and import them to another which covers this use case. Read about the options here: https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/using-toolset-module-manager/

2. No. But another user has created a module with countries and states and made it available here: hidden link. You might want to start by downloading and importing that module which creates several fields in a Field Group.

If you want countries etc. as a taxonomy, you could use the BulkPress plugin as a tool to simply create complex taxonomies in bulk.

[GTD9219]

Thanks!

[GTD9219]

A few more quick things on this:

1. An Idea. It would be great for yall to create a few of these modules that people regularly need.

2. Help Request. Will you help me with this decision-making process. In the example of Countries... that couple be implemented with categories, tags, or a dropdown. How do you recommend deciding among those. I understand the difference between single vs. multiple selection... but are there any major differences in how the implementation could be utilized among the toolset suite? I'm sorry if that is too general of a question.

3. Help Request. Somewhat related to above. Assuming a custom field OR taxonomy was made for State (in the United States). Use case: CPT Person associated with a State. What would be involved (at a high level) for:
3A. Having a page for State that show all the people's name (CPT Person Post Title) associated with State? Would a view have to be created for every single page or could that be accomplished at a "higher level"?

3B. Calculating the number of people associated with a state and showing the list of states in order from most number of people to least? E.g. California (32), Georgia (27), Wyoming (15), .... etc?

[Nigel]

Hi there

1. Noted, and passed along.

2. Categories or tags or dropdowns. I'm not entirely sure what you are asking here (dropdowns is a type of input field used for WordPress categories, it's not an either/or compared to categories or tags).

The main issue I think you ought to consider with something like this is whether to use taxonomies or custom fields. Taxonomies are optimised for queries in a way that custom fields are not, and on large sites running a query to return posts based upon one or more custom field values can be resource-intensive and affect performance. But taxonomies have limited options for sorting in comparison, so it depends on how you intend to use this.

3. You are basically describing taxonomy archives. If you had a "state" taxonomy with terms such as "florida" then visiting site.com/state/florida would display a list of all posts with the state term florida. You can create taxonomy term meta (custom fields for taxonomies) and make a custom archive for the taxonomy so that, for example, it displayed the state flag at the top of the page.

You can display post counts for the terms (e.g. Florida (23)) to show that there are 23 posts with the term Florida, and you can create a Taxonomy View to display state terms and order them by the post count, so your final example should be possible.

[GTD9219]

This helped! Thanks a lot.

So, for the purpose of Countries & States + Queries & Counts and levarging the built-in optimization for queries, I could use either of these implementations tactics:

1 Custom [Hierarchical] Category (super=country, sub=state)

or

2 Custom Taxonomies (Country, State) with basic conditional logic to do something like show and sort by display count of States IF Country = United States)

[Nigel]

You mean whether to use a single hierarchical custom taxonomy or use multiple custom taxonomies, one for each level (e.g. country, state) etc.

I would opt for the latter choice as WordPress queries largely ignore the position of a term in the hierarchy in queries. If you had a 3-level hierarchy for example (e.g. a location taxonomy with country, state, county), it's not so easy to say show me only second-level location terms (i.e. states).

That's more straightforward is states is its own taxonomy.

[GTD9219]

Thanks... although this does get wonky if trying to do stuff at a city, st, country level...