The origin story
So there I was, staring at a long dead website through time machine. The client wanted it back, and not a "modern refresh" kind of back. They wanted everything exactly as it was. Every page, every link, every weird layout choice. The whole thing was resurrected from the Wayback Machine, because that is what you do when the original source just does not exist anymore.
And this site? It was the poster child for old school web design. Fixed width tables. The kind of layout you can spot from literal miles away. The ones that scream "I was built when dial up was a flex." I am not throwing shade, honestly. That site had character.
The catch
Here is where it got interesting. That classic travel site did something that modern WordPress just straight up refuses to do out of the box. It had two completely separate content types running side by side.
First you had your regular posts. Standard blogging stuff, categories and everything. But then you also had destinations. And destinations were a whole other beast. They had parent and child relationships, so one destination could nest inside another. Country to city. Region to spot. Full tree structure.
On top of that, destinations had their very own categories, totally independent from the post categories. Two content systems, two category systems, living in one site.
Now WordPress? It can do categories, sure. It can do posts, sure. But posts do not support parent and child pages the way we needed. That hierarchical structure just is not part of the post story. So out of the box, WordPress was a hard no on this one.
The workaround that became the plan
So I did what any pragmatic dev does. I wrote a simple function that added a "destination" option to the site. Basically a clone of a post, but not a post. Same editor, same featured image, same excerpt, same vibe. But with the parent and child depth baked in, plus its own category system.
It worked. The client got their site back, exactly how they remembered it, tables and all. Mission complete.
But the more I looked at that function, the more I realized something. This little rescue script was actually a decent product idea. Travel bloggers everywhere fight this exact battle. They want rich destinations that stack inside each other, and WordPress gives them a shrug.
Enter WP Nomad
So I took that throwaway function and gave it a real life. It became a standalone plugin called WP Nomad.
The core of it is the Destination custom post type. It acts like a post, full editor, featured images, excerpts, author, revisions, all of it. But it is hierarchical, so you can build that parent and child structure without fighting the platform. Think country down to city, city down to neighborhood. Nest it however deep you need.
Each destination gets its own categories, completely separate from posts, because that is the whole point. Two content worlds, both respected.
It also ships with a clean permalink structure so destination URLs stay tidy, plus a featured status system. Flag a destination as your current location or a future destination, with little badges that show up on the frontend. There is a hide from archives toggle too, so you can keep certain places out of public listings when you want them gone. And since it is Elementor friendly, it even comes with a Location widget.
Where it stands
I have not brainstormed the full feature list yet. I have been buried in UniCep automation, which is the main gig right now. WP Nomad is the side project. The one I am genuinely excited about though.
Do I know exactly what I am adding next? Not really. Do I have a long list of ideas waiting? Absolutely Not. But right now it is a working plugin that solves a real problem, born from a real rescue mission, and it already does the one thing nothing else would do out of the box.
Will I actually finish it and ship the whole roadmap? Hopefully. That is the plan, no cap.
Why it matters
Beyond the nostalgia of reviving an old site, WP Nomad fills an actual gap. Travel blogging has its own rhythm, its own structure, and its own mess of content relationships. Generic WordPress treats every destination like another blog post. That is a mismatch. Destinations deserve better than being shoehorned into a flat list.
If you run a travel blog, or you ever get handed a decades old travel site to bring back from the dead, you know the pain. WP Nomad is my answer to that pain. One plugin, parent and child depth, separate categories, and a place to call home for every place you have ever been. Are there other travel blogging plugins that may solve the same problem? most likely hundreds even thousands maybe, did I bother to look up no, will I? yes but to find gaps in them.