The Ultimate Taxonomy Plugin for WordPress

“Taxonomy” is a confusing word and one that many people don’t like. It’s hard to remember, it contains the word “tax”, and it sounds like a little too much like “taxidermy” for comfort.

However, recently WordPress has adopted the word “taxonomy” as an additional way to organize information in more advanced ways than can be done with tags and categories.

In this example, we’re going to show you how to create a full staff directory. After reading this tutorial, you’ll be able to create a page for your company, sub-pages for each department in your company and finally place all your staff members into a department.

If you need more background before we start, it would be worth your time to read this two other tutorials:

If you read the first tutorial and this one, you’ll appreciate how much easier this process is than even a year ago.

Step 1. Install Ultimate Taxonomy Manager

Go to Plugins > Add New and search for Ultimate Taxonomy Manager.
Click Install Now.
Click Activate Plugin.
Go to Settings > Taxonomy Manager to access the plugin.

Step 2. Create a New Taxonomy

Go to the Settings > Taxonomy Manager > Custom Taxonomies tab.
Enter the name of the taxonomy. Use only lower case, letters, numbers and hyphens. In this case we’ll enter “company-departments”.
Choose Posts or Pages or both to associate the taxonomy with the Post Type. In this case we’ll use just Pages.

Click Show More Options.
Change Hierarchical to True. This will allow you to have top-level departments and lower level ones if you wish.
There are many other options here, but the defaults will work for our purposes.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and Add Taxonomy to save the new entry.

Step 3. Create Departments

Go to the Dashboard Menu.
Go to Pages > company-departments on the Dashboard menu. This is a new link and appears in a very similar position to both Tags and Categories which are the default ways of organizing content in WordPress.

Add Departments. These will all be departments of the your company. In the example below we’re creating a department called Marketing.

Step 4. Create Pages for Your Staff Members

Go to Dashboard > Page > Add New.
Add a page for each staff member.

On the right-hand side you will now be able to assign them to a department using your new taxonomy.

Step 5. Use the Taxonomy

If you search the WordPress plugin directory, there are a wide variety of plugins available to use your taxonomy. We’re going to choose one: Taxonomy Widget.