Displaying category archive of custom post types

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I am woefully late to the party on Custom Post Types and only started using them quite recently, so apologies if my questions seems idiotic, but I can’t seem to find an answer to my question.

I’ve set up a custom post type called actors with a couple of custom field values, and (crucially), I’m using standard categories to separate these actors into men, women and children listings:

'taxonomies' => array('category', 'post_tag')

…since I thought that would be a much cleaner and neater way of… well, categorizing the actors. However, I’m completely stumped at how to actually display these categories in any way, shape or form.

I have a custom archive-actors.php file which displays all of the actors, but I want to be able to filter them by category; e.g. only display the men. However if I guess at a standard URL like mysite.com/category/actors/men I just get

Sorry, but there aren’t any posts in the Men category yet.

The same thing happens if I just try mysite.com/category/men – in neither case is it using the archive-actors.php template, either.

Can anyone help clear away my fog of dull-mindedness and point me in the right direction so I can filter out these pesky actors?

Edit:

As @mrwweb alludes to below (and I forgot to mention I had tried), the following can be added to the functions.php file:

function query_post_type($query) {
    $post_types = get_post_types();

    if ( is_category() || is_tag()) {

        $post_type = get_query_var('actors');

        if ( $post_type ) {
            $post_type = $post_type;
        } else {
            $post_type = $post_types;
        }

        $query->set('post_type', $post_type);

        return $query;
    }
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'query_post_type');

…as referenced here which does work, insofar as it will display my categorised custom post types on the regular archive.php page, but doesn’t utilise my archive-actors.php, which is key.

3 s
3

You can force use of your template for categories with the category_template filter:

function wpa57439_category_template( $templates="" ){
    if( !is_array( $templates ) && !empty( $templates ) ) {
        $templates = locate_template( array( 'archive-actors.php', $templates ), false );
    } 
    elseif( empty( $templates ) ) {
        $templates = locate_template( 'archive-actors.php', false );
    }
    else {
        $new_template = locate_template( array( 'archive-actors.php' ) );
        if( !empty( $new_template ) ) array_unshift( $templates, $new_template );
    }
    return $templates;
}
add_filter( 'category_template', 'wpa57439_category_template' );

adapted from Filter Hierarchy in codex.

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