How Can the Users Make a “Playlist” of Posts?

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I have an audio website and I want to allow users to make custom playlists from posts.

I am using posts as Albums which contains the Tracks. I thought of creating a custom post type and using it to hold a user select playlist based on the default posts.

Is this a good idea or is there a better way to allow users to create custom playlist.

Notes:

  • I had a look at this tutorial. It is what I’m looking for but for individual tracks in the post.
  • The audio is stored in arrays in custom fields, i.e custom_audio{ audio=>"name", url=>"www.text.com"}

1 Answer
1

What you are looking for is to create a relationship between a Custom Post Type and the Post type.

If your users have editing capability for the CPT, then yes, it’s a good idea to use the CPT’s to hold the information about the Albums (normal posts).

The easiest/fastest solution is to use a plugin.

Posts to Posts is meant exclusively for this (my emphasis):

This plugin allows you to create many-to-many relationships between
posts of any type: post, page, custom etc. A few example use cases:

  • manually curated lists of related posts
  • post series
  • products connected to retailers
  • etc.

Additionally, you can create many-to-many
relationships between posts and users. So, you could also implement:

  • favorite posts of users
  • multiple authors per post
  • etc.

And another one is Advanced Custom Fields. As I’m a regular user, I can illustrate its use for this case.

Create a Field Group with the following configuration:

advanced-custom-fields configuration
click to enlarge

That results in this:

advanced-custom-fields result

The result snapshot have a little trick though. The normal box that ACF generates has a very short height.
To modify the box height, use the following code in your theme’s functions.php file, or a custom plugin which makes this theme independent.

/** 
 * ADJUST THE VALUE OF 'playlists' TO THE CUSTOM POST TYPE SLUG
 * ADJUST THE VALUE OF #acf-album_posts TO MATCH THE FIELD NAME 
 */ 
add_action('admin_head-post.php', 'wpse_73351_admin_head');
add_action('admin_head-post-new.php', 'wpse_73351_admin_head');

function wpse_73351_admin_head()
{
    global $post;
    
    // Not our post_type, do nothing
    if ( 'playlists' != $post->post_type )
        return;     
    ?>
        <style>
            #acf-album_posts select {
                height: 400px !important;
            }
        </style>
    <?php
}

Finally, read the plugin’s documentation to see how to grab the album_posts field value and play that funky music 🙂

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