How to Register Custom Taxonomy For WordPress Users [WordPress Tip]

The Custom Taxonomy feature has been introduced since WordPress 2.9. It allows you to create custom groups for Post, Page as well as Custom Post Types. Say that you are building a book directory website, and you have created a Custom Post Type for posting the Books. By using Custom Taxonomy, you can create a custom taxonomy for it, called Genre. Within this Genre taxonomy, you can create a number of items (which technically is called terms) such as Fiction, Kids, or Biography for grouping the Books. Unfortunately, at this point, we can't register Custom Taxonomy to Users; at least not in a straightforward way as we would register it in the other Post Types. One perfect application that we could foresee from this idea is that we can use it to assign additional user attributes, such as their occupation, profession or organizational position, in place of registering a new set of User Roles. It also opens the possibility to query the users based upon the assigned taxonomy terms. If this idea is something that may benefit your website, take a look at this tip.

Getting Started

First, we will install a plugin named User Taxonomies to simplify our job. Once the plugin is activated. Go to GenerateWP to generate the Taxonomy codes. Put the code output in the functions.php file of your theme. This code snippet below is an example. Though, it has been stripped out to make this article look shorter. You can [...]