How do I append multiple taxonomies to the URL?

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Multiple taxonomies in URL

How does one append multiple taxonomies to the URL having the following:

  • Post Type: products
  • Taxonomy: product_type
  • Taxonomy: product_brand

Adding new product and selecting type and brand for this product:

When adding a new product, there are two taxonomy boxes (product_type and product_brand). Let’s call this new post Test Product 1. The first thing we want to do is tick what type of product I’m dealing with, let’s say cell-phones. Next, I want to tick what brand the product belongs to, let’s say samsung.

Now “Test Product 1” is associated with the type “cell-phones” and the brand “samsung”.

The desired end result is:

/products
» View all custom posts

/products/cell-phones
» View all custom posts with the taxonomy cell-phones

/product/cell-phones/samsung/
» View all custom posts where the taxonomy is cell-phones AND samsung

/products/cell-phones/samsung/test-product-1
» View the product (single custom post)

The question

How would one make this possible? My initial thought was using one taxonomy, having “cell-phones” as the parent term of “samsung”. Actually appending the taxonomy and its terms was not so tough. But it led to a lot of other issues, some well known, some not so much. Anyway it doesn’t work like that as it gives 404 issues and WP won’t allow certain things.

WP.org » taxonomy-archive-template

This lead me to having rethought the structure, having to leave taxonomies and its terms and I thought; why not create a 2nd taxonomy, and associate the post type with it and append that to the url?

Good question indeed, but how?

4 s
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This is certainly possible by utilizing some rewrite rules of your own to some extent. The WP_Rewrite API exposes functions that allow you to add rewrite rules (or ‘maps’) to convert a request to a query.

There are prerequisites to writing good rewrite rules, and the most important one is basic regular expression comprehension. The WordPress Rewrite engine uses regular expressions to translate parts of a URL to queries to get posts with.

This is a short and good tutorial on PHP PCRE (Perl compatible regular expressions).

So, you’ve added two taxonomies, let’s assume their names are:

  • product_type
  • product_brand

We can use these in queries like so:

get_posts( array(
    'product_type' => 'cell-phones',
    'product_brand' => 'samsung'
) );

The query would be ?product_type=cell-phones&product_brand=samsung. If you type that as your query you will get a list of Samsung phones. To rewrite /cell-phones/samsung into that query a rewrite rule must be added.

add_rewrite_rule() will do this for you. Here’s an example of what your rewrite rule might look like for the above case:

add_rewrite_rule( '^products/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/?',
    'index.php?product_type=$matches[1]&product_brand=$matches[2]',
    'top' );

You will need to flush_rewrite_rules() as soon as you’ve added the rewrite rule to save it to the database. This is done only once, there is no need to do this with every request, once a rule is flushed its there. To remove it simply flush without the added rewrite rule.

If you want to add pagination you can do so by doing something like:

add_rewrite_rule( '^products/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/(\d*)?',
    'index.php?product_type=$matches[1]&product_brand=$matches[2]&p=$matches[3]',
    'top' );

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