Approach to creating a site with this structure

Question

I'm tasked with making a site that has 'families'. Each family has a gallery, a 'region', and a 'name', both of which are searchable upon.

My initial thoughts about this were to create a template for a child page of 'Families' that contains 2 custom fields (name and region), and just use some gallery plugin on each page.

My question: Is there a better mechanic in Wordpress to solve the problem I'm presenting?

I'm a developer, so I see this readily as several tables in a custom CMS that I'd just whip up over the weekend ("6 hours tops, promise!") that would quickly get out of hand, so I'd love to leverage my knowledge of WP to get this done more efficiently.

Answer 1

you could make category for each family (name), and a (sub)category for each region, and then assign custom templates to each category using category templates plugin. or - in case you want to use pages instead of posts/categories - then you don't need this plugin but instead just create additional page templates for each family..

both ways will give you a box when you go to create new post / new page which will be on the right side - and there you will be able to choose a custom template for each post/page.

for gallery, I recommend NextGEN - you can create separate gallery for each family, and assign them (gallery categories) to post categories or pages. NextGEN will give you lots of options.

Answer 2

Families as in actual families, or families as in the programming families?

If it's actual families, I would suggest setting up a wordpress network (formerly wordpressMU) and giving each it's own site.

If it's programming families, I would create a category for each family, plus a category for what it is (not subcategories in this case), I would also make a custom page template for each "type" category. I would also put a custom field in the query posts that is just the family category id. This means you wouldn't just use the standard cat=#, you would use query_posts(array('category__and' => array(2,6))); where you change 2 for the type and 6 for your custom field.

Answer 3

I would make two custom taxonomies: Region and Family, assigned to a hierarchical post type: Familiy Member.