Configure the Labels

In the last episode, you and I registered a custom taxonomy with the minimum configuration. But look at the taxonomy interface in the back-end. What do you see? The top of the page says “Departments” but the rest of the interface says “Category.” Hum, do you think that will confuse your customer? Yes, it will.

One of our jobs as a WordPress developer is to make the interface as easy to use as possible. That means we need to make sure the labels are right, instructions are clear, and the entire interface is clear and self-supporting. You don’t want them to be misleading or confusing. Why?

Why should you take the time to make the interface clear and helpful? To empower your customer to be able to use it on their own without your help. You want your customer to be capable of writing, editing, changing, deleting, and managing their content on their own. Otherwise, what happens? They need up being dependent upon you. They open support tickets and take your valuable time away from your other paid work. That means for you: your profit margin is decreasing with each question, i.e. assuming that you are not being compensated.

In this episode, let’s walk through how to customize the labels for our custom taxonomy. Step-by-step, let’s walk through the process. We’ll go through each label and see where it changes the label in the back-end.

You’ll learn about the internationalization functions and when to wrap your label strings in the __() and _x() and why.

Here is the link to register_taxonomy() in the WordPress Codex.