Custom Post Types, Pagination and 404 not found pages

Hey everyone, just to share something I found out today about custom post types, pagination and 404 not found pages while I was working on my site redesign.

The situation

I created a custom post type for it and was using a page to loop through and display each entry.

The problem

Searching a bit got me similar solutions to this: http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/pagination-issue-for-custom-post-type-in-wordpress-30/28915 and this: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/pagination-with-custom-post-type-getting-a-404?replies=1#post-1616810

this solved the pagination issue BUT clicking on the single entry would land me on a 404 not found page!

The solution

that shed some light as to the cause: you CAN ’T have a PAGE and a CUSTOM POST TYPE with the same name.

So making sure that the page slug is different to the custom post type rewrite slug solved the issue so I now have my pagination and my single entries working just fine

Thought I’d share this with you just in case there’s someone else out there “pulling his hair out” on this!

Cheers!

Thanks a bunch Sarah that solved my issue!!!!

Really? Oh! I’m glad

Thanks for the tips. I’m also experimenting with custom post types and taxonomies right now. I’m very disappointed in how difficult they are to use. It’s easy enough to enable custom types, but when you start to integrate them into a design and create permalinks, make custom queries, add paging, etc. it’s overly complicated and difficult. I think WordPress has something great here, in theory only, because in practice these are still unrefined features.

Here’s a quick example, if I make a custom taxonomy for a custom post type:

Post type: Products
Taxonomy: Manufacturers

Now I’ll add a product called “Computers” and give it the manufacturers “Dell” and “HP”. If I try and query all products for “Dell” and “HP” it won’t. It requires a complex rewrite of the query to pull 2 or more custom taxonomy items in a single query.

Another issue related to this same problem, if I want to pull just 1 of those taxonomy items, lets say “Dell” then I would query “manufacturers” => “dell”, but I won’t get any output unless I specify “products” as the “post_type”. That shouldn’t matter. It should pull ALL post types using that taxonomy. This makes it impossible to have taxonomies that cross multiple post types and pull dynamically into a page without knowing which post types use that taxonomy and specify them as an array “post_type” => array(“products”, “services”)

It’s easy enough to enable custom types, but when you start to integrate them into a design and create permalinks, make custom queries, add paging, etc. it’s overly complicated and difficult. I think WordPress has something great here, in theory only, because in practice these are still unrefined features.

My upcoming real estate theme makes heavy use of custom post types and taxonomies, and I couldn’t agree more that these features are still in their infancy.

Thanks for the post Sarah! I left an article about custom posts on my blog. It can help if you want to list your custom post types with ordering, filtering and pagination options : http://geryit.com/blog/2011/03/wordpress-custom-post-types/

Thanks for your solution!! Helped me al the way. Happy again