How to output custom taxonomy terms in Kadence Element builder

I’ve been developing custom WordPress themes for almost 15 years now. Most of the time, this routinely involves the creation of custom post types and custom taxonomies in order to create customized display of clients data, generally organized around content types that are more specialized than just the “pages” and “blog posts” that WordPress comes with out the box. This required me learning a fair bit of PHP, and digging deep into the WordPress Kodak’s to learn all about the custom WordPress loop functions.

The Kadence Element Builder is a much easier way to do that for no-code web designers and beginning developers to accomplish this without having to learn PHP, CSS, and JavaScript. While I still think that it’s valuable to learn those languages, if you’re trying to quickly spin up website models to demonstrate functionality to a client, or in cases where what you are templating is not super complicated, this is a good route to go down. This requires a license for Kadence Pro, which brings powerful developer friendly features to the otherwise free Kadence Theme.

Learn about how to enable Kadence Element Builder at https://www.kadencewp.com/blog/introducing-kadence-elements-templates-design-your-site-your-way/

One thing that isn’t immediately apparent is how to output the terms within custom taxonomies for your custom post types that you are building templates for. The example below is for a website I built for the Portland Winter Light Festival, and specifically, the template showing off WLF single experiences.

I wanted to display on the page the terms of two different taxonomies I created, for these art pieces: the geographical Zone the art piece resides at, and the Type of art it is.

There are two different block elements that can help with this. If you want to do all of your styling of the data output through a GUI interface then you can use the Dynamic List element. This is a new element that comes with Kadence Blocks Pro as of April 2022. This block fills in a gap in the ability to display dynamic data and is important for creating theme templates. You must have a license for Kadence Blocks Pro for this.

See the screenshot below for the basics of how to set this up.

The alternative is to use theme builder elements that are created by WordPress directly, which are not dependent upon having a Kadence Blocks Pro license. This is also a good route to go if you’re more comfortable with creating the CSS rules in your theme files, rather than the backend GUI interface. Or maybe your budget is limited and don’t want another paid plugin to manage.

After you’ve built your custom taxonomy (with code or the CPT UI plugin), you can find new native WP elements for looping through the taxonomy terms and outputting terms and links to their archives. See screenshot below.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the options are far more limited as to what you can accomplish purely through the GUI block editor with this:

If you’ve found this article helpful, drop me a comment to let me know, so I can continue to spend time on making these very specific functionality tutorials.