Wordpress: Relating Posts To Each Other: Separate CPT?

[jeremy58]

I want to create a new type of content UI to showcase a “main story” and the on the page, show all of the related posts.

Scenario: My town is planning on building a new library. That are about 10 posts related to that (city council voting, proposals for the architechture, etc). There will be more as there will be further debates, and eventually breaking ground, and the ribbon cutting when it’s built, etc.

I want to create a “one post/page to rule them all” concept. The main content for the page would be a couple of paragraphs, explaining the gist of the proposal.

Then I would link all of the related post to the “Library” page, so that users can simply follow along that page, and share it with their friends that haven’t heard of the library development yet.

I THINK the best way to do this would be to create a new CPT. I would call it something like “Stories” or “Developments.” Each development like the new library, or something else major (well major by my small town’s standards) would get a new “Story” provided there’s going to be at least a handful of posts related to it.

This would, in my estimation, give me the best SEO (since this one “Story” will get the most links) and it would be the easiest for users to share (easier to share one single page that houses most of the data, not that you get to control what is that people share on social media).

I could even go as far as pulling in comments from the “related” posts into the “Story” so that the comments would be somewhat consolidated.

The alternative would be to just use Pages. I could make a page for each story, and then bring in each related post after I add them.

How would you handle this?

[Martyr2]

Well custom post types are good for creating entities that may have very special custom fields that a regular post would not have. If every “Story” had fields like “Council Members involved” or “Decision date” then you could build the custom post type.

Now this is different than creating a page which features the one story and a side panel featuring related “Stories”. That would be the job for a template. You could create a page that displays a single Story custom post type, with a side panel that will query for additional Story custom post types (aka the template would run its own query for finding related stories for example).

If your Stories are not really introducing anything new that a default Post could do, then I wouldn’t bother with the custom post type and just build a template that displays the main post article and then have the sidebar that queries for the related posts.

So for a solution here, you can either do regular posts or custom posts but the way you display them will probably be done with a template on a page in either scenario (based on what you have explained).

That is how I would approach it.