Many to Many Relationship between custom post types

• sjaeckel

• November 7, 2013 at 8:26 pm

Currently, by using the relationship – field, it is only possible to build a relation in a one way direction.

-> 1:n relationship

You have a really nice tutorial about doctors and locations at the tutorial secion. You can bind locations to doctors, but you cannot bind doctors to locations.

Workaround:
Currently, i have to build a 1:n relationship for doctors relating to locations and 1:n relationship for locations relating to doctors and finally, i have to merge the post ids in code. Really Dirty!

An absolutely nice solution would be a n:m relationship field, where both post types would have a relationship form depending on each other.

So when i add a doctor to a location on the “edit locations” – page it will be marked on the “doctors edit” – page at the same time.

Thank you for reading

• Elliot

• November 8, 2013 at 5:42 pm

Hi @sjaeckel

Thanks for the question, yes, this is a limitation of the relationship field.
What you want is to use the posts2posts plugin which provides custom fuctionality and a custom db table to do all the joins.

This will allow you to do many to many connections much better than with ACF.

http://wordpress.org/plugins/posts-to-posts/

Thanks
E