Reply To: ACF Makes Custom Post Types Obsolete?

• Porter

• February 19, 2015 at 3:49 pm

It makes sense logically, but I don’t get the “why” of it. Let me explain / link my site, to help clear things up.

The site is on night life / entertainment, and covers every restaurant, bar, hotel, etc, in the local area. In theory, each of those would be a custom post type, if I needed it (or knew why it was advantageous to use them). I’m also not sure how my sub-types would handle (Dining has – restaurants, cafes, delis, street vendors, etc).

The current custom ACF groups are as follows:

“Location Info”, which contains a “location_category” field (a check box, used to determine if it’s a bar, restaurant, music venue, or a mix), and a “city” field, used to mark which city the venue belongs to (the site covers various cities in the area).

“Basic Info”, which contains “description” and “images” fields, which is pretty self-explanatory.

“Dining_info”, which is tricky. This one, simply determines if the venue has dine in, take out, or delivery, and isn’t specific to the “Dining” section of my website, but instead applies to all templates that occasionally also have food (Bars, Dining, for now, but this is perhaps the one “messy” area at the moment).

I then have templates for “Main” categories (Music, Dining, Loding, etc), and “Secondary” categories (for music, artists and venues, dining has the sub sections mentioned earlier, etc). The templates aren’t quite done yet (design), but code-wise, dynamically show everything I need based on the ACF information, which works great. I can show events on a calendar dynamically using the page string, which is identical to the “location_category” field. This allows me to query Maps with all venues dynamically, events, and more.

IMO, I’ve done a very clever job of making this all work, but again, it needs to be future-proof, and I have a nagging in the back of my mind that says custom post types are MEANT to do exactly what I’m doing. That being said, my setup seems to make them obsolete in my situation (based on what I know), and I’m a bit lost. I also really like my url structure (site.com/dining, site.com/dining/restaurants, site.com/dining/restaurants/venue-name), and I’ve heard custom post types don’t play well with custom permalinks. Anyway, sorry for the essay of a post, but I figured I had to explain it as best I could to make proper sense here.

Ignore the incomplete main and sub category pages – anightinburlington.com