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CPT refinements & footnote experiments

Published on September 15, 2025

Last updated on June 8, 2026

This week focused on refining CPT relationships, clarifying how sources should be displayed, and continuing the cleanup of ACF vs. taxonomy usage. Forward progress was made, with some experiments set aside for future rework.

Changes completed

Organization CPT

  • Removed old featured boolean field for cleaner data.
  • Updated Organizations Referenced template to list all organizations directly (works fine since there are only a handful).
  • Decided that organization type should eventually become a taxonomy instead of an ACF select field.
  • Discussed relationship modeling: people often act as the “bridge” between orgs, so long‑term plan may be more like a graph/webbrain visualization.

Song CPT

  • Reviewed current field setup: artist, YouTube URL, cover image, bio, video screenshot, “is glue,” “is liked,” and emotional value.
  • Reconfirmed that themes belong as a taxonomy, not an ACF field — since they’re reusable across CPTs.
  • Clarified taxonomy vs. ACF once again:
    • Taxonomy = global classification (themes, tags, genres).
    • ACF = post‑specific metadata (URLs, booleans, screenshots).

Lyric CPT

  • Explored whether to move lyrics into the_content — decided not to, since lyrics need their own CPT with structured fields.
  • lyric_cover_block_full remains as the place for formatted block layouts.
  • Lyrics now display their source song CPT, and cover images properly pull from cover_image after fixing the wrong field name.

Quote & Excerpt CPTs

  • Both now display their source CPTs (book, movie, or reference).
  • Consistent design: bullet‑style list with rounded thumbnails (mirroring footnotes).
  • Excerpts trim overly long text automatically, while still linking to their full source.
  • Templates standardized so quotes/excerpts always show cover images when available, and otherwise fall back to featured images.

Visual consistency

  • Centered navigation bars and source displays.
  • Rounded thumbnails standardized across all CPTs.
  • Layouts for quotes, lyrics, and excerpts now feel cohesive.

Incomplete / deferred

Footnotes system rework

  • Attempted to add a smarter fallback chain for bios/summaries (manual bio → Wikipedia slug → nothing).
  • Implementation ran into brace mismatch errors and broke layout consistency.
  • Rolled back to the last working version for stability.
  • Plan to revisit in smaller modular chunks (one CPT type at a time).

Reference CPT cleanup

  • Current state: overloaded with ~13 fields (type, source name, URL, slug, cover, archive, credit, notes, excerpts, etc.).
  • Identified this is too complex. Plan is to split into:
    • Metadata: type, name, URL(s), related CPT.
    • Content: notes, excerpts, block HTML.
  • Extra fields like “archive link” and “credit name” will eventually be merged or removed.

Next steps

  • Revisit footnotes system modularly to avoid massive nested logic blocks.
  • Decide on final handling for grouped excerpts (either special Excerpt CPT entries or reference‑only stubs).
  • Begin actual Reference CPT simplification to reduce redundant fields.
  • Expand centering/visual cleanup to all remaining CPT templates.
  • Long‑term: consider adding plain‑text fallback fields (lyrics, excerpts, quotes) for search tools like Relevanssi.