Reply To: Opinion/Help needed for \'products\' page using ACF

• John Huebner

• September 24, 2016 at 10:48 am

You’re correct, you should create a custom post type for product https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_post_type. You would set up the post type as having an archive. Then you would create two templates single-product.php and archive-product.php. The archive template will show lists of product just like the blog archives page.

Alternately you could create custom taxonomies https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_taxonomy for things like “product-category” or “product-brand”, other divisions of products. You could then show a list of categories on the product archive page and then show to list of products on each category page by creating a template for the product category taxonomy. See the WP template hierarchy for more information https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/basics/template-hierarchy/

Your sidebar menu for products, categories, brands, etc could all be dynamically generated pulling information from the correct taxonomies and products. When a new category or brand or product is created it would automatically be added to the menu.

Most of this stuff is not ACF. You would use ACF for adding things to the custom post type and taxonomies that WP does not support, like images for each category if you wanted, field for product details that you want to show in some special way that cannot be easily done in the content editor.

Hope that helps you in the right direction.