Do I need a database of names or do I need a taxonomy

[ianzmail]

ianzmail

March 7, 2025 at 2:37 pm

Hi all, I have built a Kadence based WP site that has a custom PostType (sc_photos) that displays school photos. It has a Single Post template and an Archive template built as Kadence Elements. I am using ACF to build the PostType, the FieldGroup and two Taxonomys. So far so good and it works and is online.

Then I wanted to add function that allows me to put names to the faces in the photos. So I added 50 plain text ‘name ??’ fields to the FieldGroup and added the fields to the SinglePost and Archive display Elements, and that worked good too.

But it soon became obvious that the same names where appearing in more than one photo and that it would be nice if the names where searchable and selectable. The obvious idea was to have the names in a ‘database’ of ‘names’ but I am yet to decide the best approach to take. I am wondering how other Kadence users might go about this because the values need to end up in ACF fields and be displayed in Kadence Elements using existing dynamic linking abilities.

What I am thinking is that I would need to create a ‘names’ database and a form to add name records to it. Then I would need to be able to access those name records from a dropdown selector of some sort and to have that value assign to a field in the ACF FieldGroup that is associated to my PostType. Displaying the value in the Kadence Element is easy at that point.

Another, far easier method, would be to use a hierarchical Taxonomy with the ‘Surname’ as the parent term and ‘Firstname’ as a child term. But that is going to be a huge taxonomy with a few hundred parent level terms and several thousand child level terms. I am not sure if that approach is workable.

Any ideas or comments appreciated