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.

Creating, managing, and displaying custom post types using the Pods Framework plugin for WordPress Part 2

Okay we’re back for some more details on how to use the Pods Framework plugin to create, manage and display Custom Post Types.

Step 6 – Go ahead and set-up your fields. You’ll see that there’s a variety of options – text input, text area, etc. It should be fairly self explanatory. Here’s a screenshot of the Name field in my example.

Detail of the Name field
Detail of the Name field and it’s options
Make sure to check out the other Field options under the Additional Field Options and Advanced tabs as this can provide additional functionality.

Step 7 – Setting up Pods templates to manage how you display your Custom Post Type. You should have activated the “templates” component inside the Pods plugin. If not, do so now. Then under the Pods menu select “templates”. Click the “Add New” button at top to create a new template.

Pod's templates screen
Pod’s templates screen

Step 8 – You should now see a screen similar to this (obviously blank if it’s a new template).

Pod's template edit screen
Pod’s template edit screen

I use a pattern of creating two types of templates – a list template (for displaying a paginated and linked list of all the posts of my custom post type) and a detail template (for showing the specific details of a specific post of that custom post type). You see in the content area I have the following:

<p>
<a href="/wp-Pod-testing/team/{@member_id}">{@member_name}</a>
</p>

The {@member_id} is special template code that Pods understands – it says “look for the Pod field with this ID and place it right here.” I’ll show you how we’ll use this in the next step.

Step 9 – So let’s say you’ve created your two templates – a list view of all posts of your Custom Post Type and a detail view for an individual post of your Custom Post Type. Great. But how do we display it?
Let’s create a page. Name it (I should say change the permalink) to be exactly the same as the name of your Pod – in my example, “team”.

Pod ID
The Pod id

Step 10 – The magic: Pod Shortcode.

Pod shortcode
Pod Shortcode

So right above your Content Editor is a small green leaf icon which is the Pods shortcode utility button. Click it.

Step 11

Pods shortcode embed screen
Pods shortcode embed screen

Select “List Multiple Pod Items” if you’re doing a list display of your custom post type (do this on the page that you’ve named to reflect the ID of your Pod you want to display).

Step 12
Nothing will display in the list until you start creating new posts under your new Custom Post Type which will appear on your left sidebar in your admin screen.

CPT Admin
The Custom Post Type, created by Pods is now available for use.
So let’s go create some posts under our new custom post type.

Step 13 – Similar to Step 9, we will create a new post (in our custom post type), and using the Pods Shortcode button, we will embed the Fields data of our Custom Post Type post, using Pods template system, into the Content Editor of the post.

Pod CPT Post screen
Pod CPT Post screen

Some things to note: the slug is very important – it’s what tells the Pods Framework to display a specific post. The other important detail is the template which will tell Pods which fields to grab and display.

Conclusion
So here we’ve used Pods Framework plugin to create a custom post type, create list templates and detail templates to manage the display of our Pods data, then using the Pods Shortcode button above our Content Editor, we can easily embed that data into our pages, standard posts, as well as our custom posts types. Is this the best way of displaying data from a Pod? That depends. For the ultimate customization as far as display goes, I’d go with creating custom page templates in your theme. But if you don’t want to touch your theme files and want to avoid writing out a lot of code, the approach we covered here and in the last post works really well. This also highlights the power and flexibility of the Pods Framework.