To help visitors navigate through the items added using our new custom post type, we will need to display a list of all the book reviews on the site, along with navigation elements to be able to handle large numbers of items. While WordPress offers a built-in mechanism to list post items in the form of the archive page, it is not easy for a plugin to be able to modify the layout of the resulting page in a consistent way across all possible user themes. A better solution to display a list of custom post type items is to create a shortcode that will display one or more posts in any place selected by the user, including a page, a post, or even on the site's front page.
This recipe shows how to create a shortcode that will retrieve and display five book reviews at a time with accompanying navigation links.