How to add custom post types in WordPress without plugins

Premise: I hate plugins. 🙂

All you need to create your custom post type (CPT) is to know how register_post_type() function works. Well, around the web there are millions posts about this topic but in the below code you will see a smart function that I’ve realized to registers more than one CPT without repeat the same code again and again.

Let’s say we want to create two CPTs: books and movies. Paste the code in your function.php file and check out the comments for some explainations but what I’m gonna say you is that you can copy&paste the below code, then the only thing you need to do is add an array inside the $types array for each CPT you want.

/*
 * Add Custom post types
 */
function netgloo_custom_post_types() {

  // Here we go, this is the only thing you need to modify to registers your CPTs:
  // write inside this array ($types) an array for each CPT you want
  // (and if you need only one CPT simply let one array)
  $types = array(

    // Books
    array('type'          => 'book',
          'typePlural'    => 'books',
          'labelSingle'   => 'Book',
          'labelPlural'   => 'Books'
      ),

    // Movies
    array('type'          => 'movie',
          'typePlural'    => 'movies',
          'labelSingle'   => 'Movie',
          'labelPlural'   => 'Movies'
      )
  );

  // This foreach loops the $types array and creates labels and arguments for each CPTs
  foreach ($types as $type) {

    $typeSingle = $type['type'];
    $typePlural = $type['typePlural'];
    $labelSingle = $type['labelSingle'];
    $labelPlural = $type['labelPlural'];

    // Labels: here you can translate the strings in your language.
    // These strings will be displayed in the admin panel
    $labels = array(
      'name'               => _x( $labelPlural, ' post type general name' ),
      'singular_name'      => _x( $labelSingle, ' post type singular name' ),
      'add_new'            => _x( 'Aggiungi nuovo ', $labelSingle ),
      'add_new_item'       => __( 'Aggiungi '. $labelSingle ),
      'edit_item'          => __( 'Modifica '. $labelSingle ),
      'new_item'           => __( 'Muovo '. $labelSingle ),
      'all_items'          => __( 'Tutti le '. $labelPlural ),
      'view_item'          => __( 'Mostra '. $labelSingle ),
      'search_items'       => __( 'Cerca '. $labelPlural ),
      'not_found'          => __( 'Nessun '. $labelSingle .' trovato' ),
      'not_found_in_trash' => __( 'Nessun '. $labelSingle .' trovato nel cestino' ),
      'parent_item_colon'  => '',
      'menu_name'          => __( $labelPlural ),
    );

    // Arguments (some settings, to learn more see WordPress docs)
    $args = array(
      'labels'        => $labels,
      'description'   => 'Holds our products and product specific data',
      'public'        => true,
      'supports'      => array( 'title', 'author', 'editor', 'thumbnail', 'excerpt', 'comments', 'page-attributes' ),
      'has_archive'   => false,
      'menu_position' => 5,
      'rewrite'       => true, // default
      'menu_icon'     => get_template_directory_uri().'/assets/img/cpt-'.$typeSingle.'.png'
    );

    // Finally, we can registers the post types
    register_post_type( $typeSingle, $args );

  } // end foreach

}
add_action( 'init', 'netgloo_custom_post_types' );