Let’s say you use WordPress, and Thesis, and you decided you wanted to add a custom post type (new with WP 3.0!), for whatever reason. Maybe you just wanted a way to differentiate book reviews from other blog posts, with a custom taxonomy called Authors* and no Categories, because they don’t make sense.
You might do a web search and find these helpful links about how to make the Thesis meta boxes appear in the custom post type’s edit page. That’s awesome! But really, I want those posts to show up on my home page and in my RSS feed. I couldn’t find it documented anywhere. There are lots of examples of how to narrow down query results in order to show only some of the normal post-type posts, but not on how to add posts that aren’t showing up in the default search. It turns out it’s actually pretty easy.
So, here’s what you do!
- Create your new post type. I used Custom Post Type UI.
- Create a new post of that type. (Post Type Switcher is a nice way to change an existing post.)
- Use the Thesis Custom File Editor to edit custom_functions.php to add the following:
What it’s doing:
Line 1 is creating a new function which can be added to a hook.
Line 2 checks if we’re on the home page or in an rss feed, because those are the two places where I expect a mix of posts and bookreviews should appear.
Line 3 updates the query to look for posts of type “post” (the default) or “bookreview”—of course, you would put in your own post type here.
Line 5 adds the custom function to WordPress’s hook “parse_query”. (You could probably also use “pre_get_posts”, if you wanted. I didn’t notice a difference in behavior.
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* To pick an example completely at random. It could be there is an easier way to accomplish this, but I wanted it as a trial run before creating a custom post type for short fiction. To see if it’s feasible. It is, and it’s easy once you know how.
