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Excerpt CPT & pattern strategy

Published on September 8, 2025

Last updated on June 7, 2026

This week brought major progress on structuring excerpts, quotes, and reusable content blocks, along with clarifications on hub pages, pattern strategy, and server maintenance.

Excerpt CPT & excerpt system

  • Built a new Excerpt CPT (content-excerpt.php + excerpt-nav.php) modeled on the existing Quote CPT, with navigation and source linking.
  • Fixed issues where excerpts were incorrectly showing themselves as their own source — solution: ensure the ACF relationship field returns an object, not just an ID.
  • Standardized excerpt templates to render the cover block (the_content()) rather than custom ACF fields, simplifying reuse and ensuring consistent visual elements.
  • Decided that excerpts must be individual CPTs (rather than grouped per book) so they can be independently tagged, searched, and recombined across books, themes, and hub pages.
  • Added default featured image logic for excerpts (mirroring quotes) to ensure consistent navigation thumbnails.

Patterns vs. content

Long‑term strategy for reusable blocks:

  • Quotes, lyrics, excerpts, and lexicon entries will all be converted into cover block patterns.
  • This ensures that if design, links, or metadata change, updates only need to happen once — rather than copying/pasting blocks across chapters.
  • Patterns also allow syncing visual consistency across different CPT templates and hub pages.
  • For now, patterns will be reserved for blocks that appear in 3+ locations, while relying on the_content() for standard single‑use CPTs.

Hub pages & taxonomy strategy

  • Hubs are effectively tag archive templates, consolidating all CPTs (chapters, excerpts, quotes, movies, etc.) under a shared theme.
  • Instead of always linking to concept pages, experimenting with linking directly to hub pages, since they provide broader context.
  • However, CPT pages can also act as mini‑hubs by displaying related taxonomy terms and their associated content — a hybrid approach preserving flexibility.

Archive redirects & reserved slugs

  • Fixed conflicts with reserved slugs (excerpt, author, etc.) by renaming the excerpt archive to Excerpt Library (/excerpt-library/).
  • Confirmed that some archive redirects (e.g., /song/ redirecting incorrectly) stem from WordPress’s slug resolution quirks, not from custom code.
  • Organization and Image archives continue to work as expected.

Lexicon modernization

Lexicon entries (currently raw text) will also be converted to cover blocks/patterns. This will allow:

  • Adding formatting, images, and inline links to related CPTs.
  • Keeping styling consistent across all reference‑oriented content.
  • Eventually upgrading them into full‑fledged hub‑like entries.

Server & plugin maintenance

PHP upgrade follow‑up: After upgrading PHP on the Debian 12 VPS, WordPress flagged missing modules (imagick and intl). Installing php8.2-imagick and php8.2-intl and restarting the web server resolved the warnings.

Task & problem summary – editor slowdown: After a VPS reboot, severe slowdowns (5–8 seconds) in the WordPress editor when searching CPTs were investigated. No server‑side issues (nginx, PHP‑FPM, MariaDB). The problem was traced to a recent MailPoet update. Disabling MailPoet immediately restored instant performance. Plugin remains disabled (or rolled back) until fixed upstream.

Overall: This week solidified excerpts as their own CPT, set a long‑term path toward pattern‑based reusability, and clarified the role of hub pages vs. CPTs. On the infrastructure side, PHP and plugin issues are under control, allowing focus on content migration and refinement.