CPT-onomies

WordPress is great at providing a robust system for managing content. However, one of it’s pain points is trying to create a relationship between posts (i.e. post to post relationship). Yes there’s taxonomies but sometimes you really want to tie specific posts to other specific posts. This gets more complicated when you have three (or more) different post types that need to be related to each other. And each one of these post types need to relate to multiple individual posts of the other post types.

Enter the fantastic plugin CPT-onomies.

In a nutshell, CPT-onomies allows you to treat a post as a custom taxonomy, allowing you to link posts together as if each post title was a term in the custom taxonomy.

CPT-onomies also makes it easy to create and manage custom post types and does a great job of walking you through how this is actually done. It actually explains what the options are and how WordPress uses them. But you can create your CPTs (Custom Post Types) with other tools (or by hand) if you want and just let CPT-onomies do it’s magic. Another nice thing is that CPT-onomies follows, as much as possible, the existing structure of taxonomies within WordPress. Functions are nearly identical to the built-in taxonomy functions so its easy to incorporate in your templates.

So yeah – if you need to build out more complex relationships between posts, beyond the standard taxonomy relationships, take a look at CPT-onomies.

Three WordPress plugins I recommend

No worries – I’m not affiliated with or receive any commission from these plugins. I’ve just been happy with their functionality and usefulness and have used them on several projects.

ThreeWP Activity Monitor
Want to know what’s happening on your site? This little plugin logs *most* if not all possible activities that can be logged. The only thing better would be a server log. Can also be useful in identifying which user changed what and when.


All In One WP Security & Firewall

Very user friendly, walks you through some good security protocols, provides some degree of brute-force attack protection, provides meaningful firewall options (and explains them) and then it even provides easy functionality to make backups of your .htaccess, wp-config files and database. The only downside is that the firewall options are Apache only (although one can certainly borrow the ideas in their firewall settings and translate it to the server of their choice).

Pods Framework
See also http://pods.io/ for documentation and forums. This is an extremely powerful plugin for extending WordPress. Everything from Custom Post types to…well… custom data objects that aren’t even a part of WordPress. You can use this to bridge WordPress and other data sources to create some very powerful functionality. When I first found Pods the documentation was poor. But now, it’s pretty decent. You do need to have an understanding of PHP though and Pods is definitely not for beginners (except using it for Custom Post Types). But if you need to extend WordPress or build a bridge between WordPress and another application, I’d recommend taking a look at Pods.