Registering Custom Post Types

WordPress comes with five default post types: post, page, attachment, revision, and menu.

While developing your plugin, you may need to create your own specific content type: for example, products for an e-commerce website, assignments for an e-learning website, or movies for a review website.

Using Custom Post Types, you can register your own post type. Once a custom post type is registered, it gets a new top-level administrative screen that can be used to manage and create posts of that type.

To register a new post type, you use the register_post_type() function.

[alert]We recommend that you put custom post types in a plugin rather than a theme. This ensures that user content remains portable even if the theme is changed.[/alert]

The following minimal example registers a new post type, Products, which is identified in the database as wporg_product.

function wporg_custom_post_type() {
  register_post_type('wporg_product',
    array(
      'labels'      => array(
        'name'          => __('Products', 'textdomain'),
        'singular_name' => __('Product', 'textdomain'),
      ),
      'public'      => true,
      'has_archive' => true,
    )
  );
}
add_action('init', 'wporg_custom_post_type');

Please visit the reference page for register_post_type() for the description of arguments.

[warning]You must call register_post_type() before the admin_init hook and after the after_setup_theme hook. A good hook to use is the init action hook.[/warning]

Naming Best Practices

It is important that you prefix your post type functions and identifiers with a short prefix that corresponds to your plugin, theme, or website.

[warning]Make sure your custom post type identifier does not exceed 20 characters as the post_type column in the database is currently a VARCHAR field of that length.[/warning]

[warning]To ensure forward compatibility, do not use wp_ as your identifier — it is being used by WordPress core.[/warning]

[warning]If your identifier is too generic (for example: product), it may conflict with other plugins or themes that have chosen to use that same identifier.[/warning]

[info]Solving duplicate post type identifiers is not possible without disabling one of the conflicting post types.[/info]

URLs

A custom post type gets its own slug within the site URL structure.

A post of type wporg_product will use the following URL structure by default: https://example.com/wporg_product/%product_name%.

wporg_product is the slug of your custom post type and %product_name% is the slug of your particular product.

The final permalink would be: https://example.com/wporg_product/wporg-is-awesome.

You can see the permalink on the edit screen for your custom post type, just like with default post types.

A Custom Slug for a Custom Post Type

To set a custom slug for the slug of your custom post type all you need to do is add a key => value pair to the rewrite key in the register_post_type() arguments array.

Example:

function wporg_custom_post_type() {
  register_post_type('wporg_product',
    array(
      'labels'      => array(
        'name'          => __( 'Products', 'textdomain' ),
        'singular_name' => __( 'Product', 'textdomain' ),
      ),
      'public'      => true,
      'has_archive' => true,
      'rewrite'     => array( 'slug' => 'products' ), // my custom slug
    )
  );
}
add_action('init', 'wporg_custom_post_type');

The above will result in the following URL structure: https://example.com/products/%product_name%

[warning]Using a generic slug like products can potentially conflict with other plugins or themes, so try to use one that is more specific to your content.[/warning]

[info]Unlike the custom post type identifiers, the duplicate slug problem can be solved easily by changing the slug for one of the conflicting post types.[/info]

If the plugin author included an apply_filters() call on the arguments, this can be done programmatically by overriding the arguments submitted via the register_post_type() function.