Where to enter custom fields meta_key for customized archives?

Question

I have a post_type called books, which has custom fields for author name, publisher name, etc.

I want to create pages where publisher or authors are grouped. For example, "Penguin" or "McGraw Hill". When a user clicks on "Penguin" out of the Publisher dropdown, she should see all the books by Penguin for example.

To do this, I want to try a query like this:

    $args = array(
        'meta_key' => 'publisher'
        ,'meta_key_value' => 'Penguin'
        ,'taxonomy' => 'book'
        ,'orderby' => 'date'
        ,'posts_per_page' => 48
        ,'paged' => get_query_var('page')
    );

    $my_query = new WP_Query( $args );

My question is: where should I put this query? In the "category.php" or "archive.php"? And what will the link in the header look like?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Neither. You should put this in 'archive-book.php'. You can generate your link using get_post_type_archive_link and your link (without pretty permalinks) will look like '?post_type=book'.

You should also set up your query like so:

$args = array(
    'meta_key' => 'publisher',
    'meta_key_value' => 'Penguin',
    'post_type' => 'book',
    'orderby' => 'date',
    'posts_per_page' => 48,
    'paged' => get_query_var('page')
);

$my_query = new WP_Query( $args );

'book' in your case is not a Taxonomy, but rather a Custom Post Type. Let me know if this helps.