MB Relationships

MB Relationships helps you create relationships between posts, pages, custom post type, terms, users and custom table models. The plugin is lightweight and optimized for database and query performance.

The plugin allows you to create connections from posts to posts, posts to pages and so on. Then you can perform corresponding queries to retrieve posts that are connected to or from given posts.

Meta Box Lite We recommend using Meta Box Lite , a feature-rich free UI version of Meta Box that provides UI and all free features for managing custom fields and dynamic content on WordPress, including post types, taxonomies, custom fields, and relationships.

It supports reciprocal and bi-directional relationships.

Why Do You Need Posts To Posts Relationships In WordPress?

Post relationships is a missing part in WordPress. The only “built-in” way that mimic the post relationship in WordPress is the post_parent for pages where you can create many child pages of a page (a one-to-many relationship). Unfortunately, that’s available for pages and hierarchical post types only. Besides, it’s not many-to-many relationship.

Below are some examples of posts to posts relationships that might help you see the benefit of this feature:

Creating Related Posts In WordPress

The simplest example is to manually create related posts in your WordPress website. When you edit a post, you can select posts that have similar or related content and display them in the frontend for further reading.

You can also query backward: displaying posts that link to the being read post as a reference to provide more information to your readers. With this, you don’t need a WordPress related posts plugin anymore.

Example: Events And Bands

Suppose you have two custom post types, event and band, where:

• In each event there may be multiple bands, and
• Each band can participate in many events.

If people want to buy tickets, they could search for events in their location and see what bands are playing on a given date, or they could search for bands they like and see what date they are playing near their location.

In this example, we have created many-to-many relationships between events and bands.

Bi-directional relationships

MB Relationships allows you to create bi-directional connections. You will be able to query back and forth without any problem.

The data is stored in the database as a pair of (from_id, to_id), thus making it independent from either side.

Besides, for each side, there’s a meta box that shows what are connected from/to. So you don’t have to worry about the direction of the connection anymore.