Last updated on June 6, 2026
The reference system has grown significantly this week. Additional Custom Post Types (CPTs) are now live, and the workflow for structuring, linking, and visualizing them is becoming much clearer.
New CPTs created
- Artists — now linked directly to chapters instead of tags, featuring primary headshots and optional secondary fields.
- Profiles — for cited philosophers, historians, and thinkers, with Wikipedia summaries or custom bios.
- Movies — rectangular poster-driven layout, following the Books structure.
- Concepts (Lexicon) — individual definition pages with alphabetical navigation and future aggregation of quotes from Books, Profiles, and Chapters.
All CPTs now include ACF fields for summaries or excerpts and are indexed by custom directory pages (e.g., /artists-featured/).
Goodbye tags, hello objects
The old WordPress tag system is being deprecated in favor of structured relationships. Instead of showing generic tags, chapter pages will now pull connected people, books, movies, and concepts through ACF relationships — creating a clean, semantic index of what each chapter references.
Plan: Eventually phase out tags completely or retain only as search helpers for unstructured mentions.
Single page navigation unified
Each CPT now includes its own version of alphabetical navigation at the bottom (e.g., “Next Concept”, “Previous Profile”). These use rounded or rectangular thumbnails depending on type — reusing featured images for visual consistency with the homepage.
Tools & automation
WP-CLI scripts were used to:
- Batch assign featured images to CPTs missing thumbnails.
- Generate excerpts based on title patterns (e.g., “Books Cited Page for X”).
- Extract and import Wikipedia slugs for Profiles, Artists, and Movies.
This makes it easier to scale new entries and ensure visual consistency across search results and index grids.
Editorial logic clarified
CPTs are no longer limited to content already featured in chapters. I can now create standalone concepts, people, or works that exist independently — and pull them into chapters only if relevant. This opens up the site to speculative entries, archival sources, or pre-chapter research.
Live data, linked cleanly
Each CPT single page (Concept, Artist, Movie, Profile) can now act as a source of truth — storing not just a summary, but connected quotes, lyrics, or references. This means one artist can list all featured lyrics, one book can show all cited quotes, and concepts can show all related appearances — even if the concept isn’t fully developed in a chapter yet.
Next steps
- Migrate legacy tags into structured CPT entries.
- Standardize image dimensions for Book and Movie covers.
- Begin collecting quotes into a dedicated CPT or shared repeater field.
- Continue building the backend infrastructure to support footnotes and backlinks.
Status: Site-wide architecture is now flexible, futureproof, and fully CPT-driven. The foundation is in place for content to evolve organically — with better structure, better relationships, and fewer hacks.