List custom taxonomy terms linking to specific custom post type WordPress

Paul Featherstone comments:

Thanks for the responses here.

This is the closest I have got to what I need, the problem with this code in terms of my requirements is that the posts returned are not limited to 'mobile_review' but all custom post types, also, the list is not hierarchical (i.e. children are not indented in the list):



//function in functions.php

function get_terms_dropdown($taxonomies, $args, $post_type){

$args = array(
'post_type' => 'mobile_review'
);
$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );

while ($the_query->have_posts()){
$the_query->the_post();
}

wp_reset_query();


$myterms = get_terms('mobile_phone', 'orderby=count&hide_empty=1');//define variable to use 'the_terms()' function
$optionname = "mobile_phone";//name of taxonomy
$emptyvalue = "";//value
$output ="<select name='".$optionname."'><option selected='".$selected."' value='".$emptyvalue."'>Select a Mobile</option>'";

foreach($myterms as $term){//foreach loop for custom taxonomy list
$term_taxonomy=$term->mobile_phone;//specify which taxonomy to loop
$term_slug=$term->slug;
$term_name =$term->name;
$link = $term_slug;
$output .="<option name='".$link."' value='".$link."'>".$term_name." (".$term->count.") </option>";
//e.g. <option name='desire-hd' value='desire-hd'>Desire HD</option>
}
$output .="</select>";//concatenate closing tag for 'select' onto $output variable

return $output;//returns the drop down menu composed of three parts concatenated together

}

//output in page template

$taxonomies = array('mobile_phone');
$args = array();

echo get_terms_dropdown($taxonomies, $args, 'mobile_review');

John Cotton comments:

Paul

Forget the code for a minute - just explain as concisely as you can what you want to see...

From what you're saying, it's not the output above that's the issue, it's the page they link to that has the wrong content on. Is that correct?

JC

Paul Featherstone comments:

Bit of both - output is not showing hierarchy of parents (mobile make) and child (mobile model) i.e. there is no indent. So the output is like:

Nokia
1800
HTC
Desire HD

The main issue is, as you say, that the page they link to has the wrong content, it displays all custom posts instead of the specific type I want (I want a query that I can change to display only one type of custom post only e.g. 'mobile_review').

Does this make sense?

Sorry, was responding to other request for code, don't want to confuse matters!

Thanks, paul.

John Cotton comments:

OK - now I understand.

Well, you've got quite a bit to do....!

[[LINK href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories"]]wp_list_categories[[/LINK]] will give you the hierarchical list of your terms (assuming you've built them that way in the dashboard):

wp_list_categories( array( 'taxonomy' => 'mobile_phone') );

However, the link you'll get - as you've found - is a generic one for the term and the resulting page will, by default, show all posts that are tagged with that term.

To get around that, you'll need to customise the query on the term output page (pretty much as I should you in my first answer).

Assuming that when you show the mobile_phone tag you only ever want to show reviews, then you could create a taxonomy-mobile_phone.php file in your theme and just have this prior to the standard loop:

global $wp_query;
query_posts( array_merge( $wp_query->query, array( 'post_type' => 'mobile_review' ) ) );

(The merge is necessary to preserve the term tag coming in).

If, however, you want to <strong>sometimes </strong> have just reviews, but other times have everything, life gets more complicated since you'd have to pass in a variable to say which you wanted. The best way to do that would be to sub class the Walker_Category in wp_list_categories so that you could modify the link output to something like:

http://www.you.com/tag/mobile-phone?t=mobile_review

Then you'd need to have code in your taxonomy-mobile_phone.php to test for $_GET['t'] and adjust your query accordingly.

JC