At WordCamp US, Tracy turned to me and said “I want to do something about the actors on our site.”
Her idea was that, based on the traffic on our sites, people wanted to know a little more about the actors. The way I’d built out the site, you could get a list of all of an actor’s characters, but you couldn’t really get at everything. Tracy explained to me what people were searching for (actors who were queer, or not) and I mulled over the possibilities, sketching out three solutions.
1. Facet and Smart PHP
We originally added in actors as a plain-text field, saved as an array, for all names associated with a character. In using this, with FacetWP, it was trivial to look for all characters played by Ali Liebert. We also already had in a repeatable field, so we could put the ‘most prominent’ actor on top (see “Sara Lance”).
However what was not trivial was the idea of identifying if an actor was queer. You see some characters have multiple actors, and while today all are either queer or not, one day they may not be. I pointed this out to Tracy using the Sara Lance conundrum and Tracy cried ‘Whhhyyyyyyyy?’ and lay down on the floor.
2. Taxonomies
Characters already have a bunch of custom taxonomies, and I considered extending that to a new taxonomy for actors. That would immediately provide organizations, and adding new actors is easy on the fly. With auto-complete, we could get away from the drama of my inability to spell names (or autocorrect’s inability to believe me that in this case, I is before C).
But… Taxonomies lack extendability. Even with a mess of custom meta added in for featured images, we wouldn’t have an ‘easy’ way to track all trans actors. And we wouldn’t have enough of a future.
3. Custom Post Types
This is what we actually decided to use. A custom page for each actor. We added in two new taxonomies for actor gender identity and sexual orientation, which are then used to determine if the actor is queer or not. It gives us the most control and extendability of the choices, and the nice permalink.
There are two significant downsides to this. First, you have to add in a page for the actor before you add in the character page. Second, I had to ‘reproduce’ a loop to list all the characters played by an actor. However I was reusing the same logic as I do for shows which made it easier than it might have been.
What It Means
Understanding and predicting an unknown future is hard. It’s near impossible. You have to guess what you want things to be, and as I have said many times with the building out of LezWatchTV, you must be alright with being wrong.
