Beautiful Taxonomy Filters is a new plugin that adds filtering to your custom post type archives, based on taxonomy (terms/categories/tags). It allows visitors to filter CPTs by multiple terms on the frontend.
The plugin automatically adds rewrite rules to create pretty filter URLs, without the use of JavaScript. Beautiful Taxonomy Filters was created by Swedish plugin developer Jonathan de Jong at the Tigerton web agency. He created it using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate in order to structure the codebase with a standardized, object-oriented approach.
The plugin uses select2 to replace ugly select boxes with attractive, user-friendly dropdowns. (If JavaScript is not supported it will fall back to the default select boxes.) Below is an example from my tests using the plugin with a standard portfolio custom post type:
The plugin is capable of including as many filters as you want to include. However, if you have a post type with many different taxonimies, you may want to exclude ones that aren’t as useful for filtering.
Beautiful Taxonomy Filters includes a settings page in the admin for activating post types, easily excluding taxonomies, enabling a “clear all” link, disabling the active filters heading, changing the design, and adding custom CSS.
The plugin features the following:
- Activate filtering on any registered public custom post type
- Exclude taxonomies you don’t want visitors to filter on
- Beautifies the resulting URLs. You won’t see any /posttype/?taxonomy1=term. Instead you’ll see /posttype/taxonomy/term
- Includes a complete functional filter component for you to put in your theme
- Ability to show your visitors information about their current active filtering
- Allows for custom GET parameters to be included. Extend the filter your way with maybe a custom search-parameter or whatever you like
- Many filters and actions for modifying the plugin’s behavior
Currently, Beautiful Taxonomy Filters does not support selecting multiple terms from the same taxonomy. This feature is on the roadmap. The plugin author notes that he hopes to support this in a future release and have beautiful permalinks. If the permalinks don’t work out, he plans to add an option where you can opt out of pretty permalinks in order to gain the power of multiple terms filtering.
Beautiful Taxonomy Filters does not support the built-in “post” post type. This is because de Jong has not yet been able to create proper rewrite rules for the multiple filtering to work, due to the fact that they are handled differently by WordPress than other CPTs. If you’re looking for filtering on regular posts, you’ll need to build that yourself, as it’s not included.
This plugin provides an easy way to add multiple taxonomy filters to custom post type archives. It’s convenient and easy to extend with roughly a dozen filters and actions available. I tested it and found the plugin to work as advertised. Download Beautiful Taxonomy Filters for free from WordPress.org.
This should be in the core. imo.