I’m building a directory of people in a boarding house. What I’d like to do, is to be able to assign the following metadata to each person:
- Room number
- Parking space number
- Leadership positions
The catch is that each of these are linked to a specific year, i.e.:
- In 2010, John Smith lives in Room 2, has parking space 5 and is on
the house council. - In 2011, John Smith lives in Room 42, has parking
space 1 and is the house leader.
In addition, I need to be able to view people according to these properties, i.e. I want to see a list of all “house council” members or all people that have lived in Room 1.
My initial idea was to create a custom post type “Residents”, with a custom (hierarchical) taxonomy “Metadata”, which would have the following terms:
- 2010
- Room
- 40
- 41
- 42
- etc
- Parking space
- 1
- 2
- 3
- etc
- Leadership
- House leader
- House council
- Section monitor
- Room
- 2011
- Room
- (as above)
- Parking space
- (as above)
- Leadership
- (as above)
- Room
While this would allow me to filter residents according to room, parking space and leadership in a specific year, I’d like to be able to filter residents by a room number for all years, i.e.: instead of viewing all residents that lived in Room 2 in 2010 (which is merely a case of filtering according to 2010 > Room number > 2), I’d like to be able to view all residents that lived in Room 2 over the past 10 years.
Is this just a case of finding a sidebar widget that would allow me to select a specific sub-term from multiple parent terms in the “Metadata” taxonomy (e.g. selecting “Room 1” from “2010”, “2011”, “2012”, etc.) or is there a bigger architectural fallacy involved here?
Please let me know if I’m unclear on anything. Thanks in advance!