Multiple templates for a custom post type

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As new user to wordpress I’m finding that the preset templates structure a little restricting coming from the flexibility of other template routed CMS I’ve worked with.

Saying this, I know there are plenty of workarounds and I’m now currently in the process of trying to establish them.

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One of the main hurdles I’m finding is wrangling content into multiple locations. Currently I’m trying to output the same post type content into two sections or templates.

For example I have a custom post type “ballons” with ballon related posts. I’d like to output these posts into two different templates / sections (for this example, a normal version and a mobile version)

The url structure would ideally represent this:

/{post_type}/{post_slug}

/ballons/my_red_ballon_post
/mobile/ballons/my_red_ballon_post

The only way I know how to route this url structure to a specific template, is by using pages. If possible though, I’d like avoid having a entry in pages as there is no page specific content.

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Once this has been setup I’d like to create a listing page of all my ballons. I’d like to know if this setup is the same or different to just outputting specific posts like above.

The url structure would be:

/ballons/
/mobile/ballons/

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Thanks for your time 😀

— paul

2 Answers
2

Mobile might not be a great example — responsive design would take care of that.

Were this my project I would take a slightly different approach. Instead of prefixing the URL, I would stick the mobile on the end with an rewrite endpoint. An endpoint combined with using the template_include filter would work.

So you end up with a permalink structure like this

/{post_type}/{post_slug}

/{post_type}/{post_slug}/mobile

There are many answers that explain this elsewhere. For the mobile endpoint.

<?php
add_action('init', 'wpse74553_add_endpoints');
function wpse74553_add_endpoints()
{
    // EP_ALL adds the endpoint to everything.
    add_rewrite_endpoint('mobile', EP_ALL);
}

// this makes the naked `mobile` endpoint work vs. having to
// use something `mobile/works`.
add_filter('request', 'wpse74553_filter_request');
function wpse74553_filter_request( $vars )
{
    if(isset($vars['mobile']))
        $vars['mobile'] = true;

    return $vars;
}

From there you can hook into template_include filter and change the template if the mobile query variable is set.

<?php
add_filter('template_include', 'wpse74553_include');
function wpse74553_include($t)
{
    if(get_query_var('mobile'))
    {
         // you have a request with the mobile endpoint
         $t="mobile-template.php";
    }

    return $t;
}

The only thing to watch out for is that template_include fires on every request. It’s not specific — so if you want to use it, you’ll probably need to do more checking than above. There’s also a bunch of more specific filters; take a look in wp-includes/template.php to get an idea, specifically the function get_query_template.

For single posts you could use the single_template filter, for instance.

In short, you’re not at all limited by the template hierarchy, you can change it at will with the template_include or any of the {{type}}_template filters.

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