Manually Adding Categories to a Custom Post Type with Code

If you created your custom post type by adding the code in your theme’s functions.php file, a site-specific plugin, or in a code snippets plugin, then you will have to modify the code to add category as supported taxonomy.

Here is a full example of code where we have created a custom post type called ‘Movies’ with support for built-in categories.

function custom_post_type() {

// Set UI labels for Custom Post Type

    $labels = array(

        'name'                => _x( 'Movies', 'Post Type General Name', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'singular_name'       => _x( 'Movie', 'Post Type Singular Name', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'menu_name'           => __( 'Movies', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'parent_item_colon'   => __( 'Parent Movie', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'all_items'           => __( 'All Movies', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'view_item'           => __( 'View Movie', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'add_new_item'        => __( 'Add New Movie', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'add_new'             => __( 'Add New', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'edit_item'           => __( 'Edit Movie', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'update_item'         => __( 'Update Movie', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'search_items'        => __( 'Search Movie', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'not_found'           => __( 'Not Found', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'not_found_in_trash'  => __( 'Not found in Trash', 'twentythirteen' ),

    );

// Set other options for Custom Post Type

      

    $args = array(

        'label'               => __( 'movies', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'description'         => __( 'Movie news and reviews', 'twentythirteen' ),

        'labels'              => $labels,

        'supports'            => array( 'title', 'editor', 'excerpt', 'author', 'thumbnail', 'comments', 'revisions', 'custom-fields', ),

        'hierarchical'        => false,

        'public'              => true,

        'show_ui'             => true,

        'show_in_menu'        => true,

        'show_in_nav_menus'   => true,

        'show_in_admin_bar'   => true,

        'menu_position'       => 5,

        'can_export'          => true,

        'has_archive'         => true,

        'exclude_from_search' => false,

        'publicly_queryable'  => true,

        'capability_type'     => 'page',

        'show_in_rest'        => true,

          

        // This is where we add taxonomies to our CPT

        'taxonomies'          => array( 'category' ),

    );      

    // Registering your Custom Post Type

    register_post_type( 'movies', $args );

  

}

  

/* Hook into the 'init' action so that the function

* Containing our post type registration is not 

* unnecessarily executed. 

*/

add_action( 'init', 'custom_post_type', 0 );

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'query_post_type');

function query_post_type($query) {

  if( is_category() ) {

    $post_type = get_query_var('post_type');

    if($post_type)

        $post_type = $post_type;

    else

        $post_type = array('nav_menu_item', 'post', 'movies'); // don't forget nav_menu_item to allow menus to work!

    $query->set('post_type',$post_type);

    return $query;

    }

}