Add a Custom Taxonomy Filter to WordPress Custom Post Type

Recently, a client needed to be able to filter their custom post type posts list by a given taxonomy, making it easier to find what they were looking for.   Fortunately with WordPress this isn’t difficult.

For the example below, the client was a restaurant who had a custom post type named dish, and a taxonomy associated with it named dish-type.

All that was required was to add the following code to your theme, or child-theme’s functions.php file.

add_action( 'restrict_manage_posts', 'my_restrict_manage_posts' );

function my_restrict_manage_posts() {
  global $typenow;
  $taxonomy = 'dish-type';
  if( $typenow != "page" && $typenow != "post" ){
    $filters = array($taxonomy);
    foreach ($filters as $tax_slug) {
      $tax_obj = get_taxonomy($tax_slug);
      $tax_name = $tax_obj->labels->name;
      $terms = get_terms($tax_slug);
      echo "<select id="$tax_slug" class="postform" name="$tax_slug">";
      echo "
<option value="">Show All $tax_name</option>";
      foreach ($terms as $term) { echo '
<option selected="selected" value=". $term-&gt;slug, $_GET[$tax_slug] == $term-&gt;slug ? ">' . $term-&gt;name .' (' . $term-&gt;count .')</option>'; }
      echo "
</select>";
    }
  }
}

The results of the above code are as follows – a nice filter allowing the user to easily find what they are looking for by refining by a custom taxonomy.