What should I use – Taxonomies, custom fields, Post Type?

I’ve setup a traveling/photography blog. I want to have different post types: Traveling, Hotel Reviews, etc. For the traveling post, I want to add unique data like: City, Weather (for the current time for that day), Geotag meta data (long. and lat.). etc.

I am new to custom taxonomies, custom post types and custom fields. For example, I don’t know when I should use custom taxonomies and when to use custom fields.

There are many plugins out there that I thought buying, here are two of them:
http://codecanyon.net/item/easy-custom-content-types-for-wordpress/234182
http://www.dev4press.com/plugins/gd-taxonomies-tools/features/

What I want to achieve:

1) Add a city for a custom post type (choose from a list of cities using a drop down list of the cities that I’ve added to a list) and also attach an image of the city to the bottom of my post.

2) Choose a weather and use an icon to show the user the current weather for that day of shooting
3) Have a URL like:
http://mydomain.com/city-name
http://mydomain.com/city-name/post-name.html

As city-name would be the taxonomy – but what if I have several taxonomies, how can I build my permalink structure to maintain that structure?

4) Optimization & speed – From what I’ve read, I need to use a numerical value as the first element in my permalink structure in order to minimize stress on my WordPress DB and also to prevent WordPress from creating verbose rules. Does that imply to taxonomies in the URL too?

There are many questions that I don’t have answer for. I am very confused with all the plugins and information out there any really need help from you guys.

Thanks in advance.

You can use so many free plugins to create custom post types like:

• Custom Post Type UI
• Custom Content Type Manager
• Custom Press
• Content Types
• WP Easy Post Types

which all do the same as the two you you listed and some do even more, in creating custom post type, custom taxonomies and as for custom fields not all of them have that feature but there are a few who do, and you even for that you have some amazing free plugins like:

• Simple Fields
• More Fields
• Verve Meta Boxes

with the right plugin or combination of plugins you don’t have to spend a dime (donations to plugins authors is more the welcome) you can achieve exactly what you want. And after that long list you can doo all of that your self by code with the help of the Codex and this great site.

Now the main question

What should I use – Taxonomies, custom fields, Post Type?

I follow my own set of rules by deciding what kind of data i need stored and what i need to do with it.

• Post types – for all major data
  records that need/not to be displayed
  or queried.
• taxonomies – for grouping
  posts/custom records together, helps a lot
  in queries.
• custom fields – for extra data that
  needs to be per post/custom record
  ,maybe even to help in queries.

Good luck.