The No BS Spiritual Book Club

A WordPress build that turns a series of book interviews into a living library, three related post types modelled with ACF so each book is counted across every guest who picks it, powering automatic rankings of the most-loved books. The client called it "ingenious digital architecture."

The brief

The client runs an interview series where each guest shares their ten favourite books. The existing Divi site was a blog; the goal was to turn it into something that could analyse taste across all guests, which books come up most often, what men pick versus women, what's popular in each category, and surface those rankings on their own pages.

That required moving from posts to a real data model. Guests, books, authors, and categories all needed to be separate, related records, with each book stored once so it could be counted accurately across every guest who picked it. The rankings then fall out of querying that structure rather than being maintained by hand.

Project details

Industry Publishing / Media
Timeline 8 Weeks
Type WordPress Development
Live Website Visit here
Stack
ACF PHP WordPress

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What was built

A custom content structure on three related post types, plus a set of automatically generated ranking pages built on top of it.
Three custom post types
  • Contributor: name, bio, image, gender, and their ten book picks
  • Book: name, cover, category/subcategory, publish date, affiliate link
  • Book Author: maintained as a single record per author
Categories and subcategories
  • Books are classified by category and subcategory
  • This classification drives both browsing and the per-category rankings
Contributor post builder
  • Each contributor's ten picks are selected from existing Books via ACF relationship fields
  • Books already in the system are reused by reference, no retyping titles or re-uploading covers
  • Affiliate links live on the Book, so they stay correct everywhere the book appears
Automatically generated ranking pages
  • Top 20 books of all time
  • Top 10 chosen by women / Top 10 chosen by men
  • Top 10 in each category
  • Every ranking is computed from the underlying data, so adding a new interview updates all of them with no manual editing
Cross-linked browsing
  • Books, authors, and contributors are all linked and navigable in both directions
  • Each Book page lists every contributor who picked it

Screenshots

Screenshots of the live site

Technical notes

Rankings as queries, not manual lists
The "top 20", gender splits, and per-category top tens aren't hand-maintained pages — they're computed by counting how many contributors reference each book. Because every pick is a real relationship between a contributor and a single Book record, the counts are accurate and the rankings stay current automatically as new interviews are published.
One record per book, counted across contributors
Every book exists as a single Book post no matter how many guests pick it. A second contributor choosing an existing title references it rather than duplicating it. This is what makes the analytics trustworthy — a book's popularity is a real count of distinct contributors, not an approximation across duplicated entries.
Gender split powered by contributor data
The "women choose / men choose" rankings read the gender field on each contributor, then aggregate that contributor's picks. The split is a direct consequence of the data model — no separate lists to maintain, and it recalculates the moment a new contributor is added.
Relationships via ACF, not taxonomies
Connections between contributors, books, and authors are modelled with ACF relationship fields rather than tags or categories — categories are reserved for actually classifying books. Each link is a real post-to-post reference, which keeps the relational queries behind the rankings accurate and navigable in both directions.
Built on the client's existing setup
The site extends the existing theme with ACF rather than a bespoke build. The post types, fields, and ranking templates do the work; the theme handles presentation. This kept the focus on the data model and the analytics — the part the client actually asked for — while staying maintainable on their side.

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