Great talk by Rebekah at this meetup! For anyone that has needed or wanted a plugin that creates custom post types and has tried Advanced Custom Fields, this might be a great alternative! The name of the plugin as mentioned is Pods.
What is this Pods Plugin all about?
The Pods Framework allows an ordinary user or developer to easily create and extend custom post types, content types, taxonomies, users, media, or comments — helping you keep your content organized and speed up the development of your project.
Rebekah is an experienced freelancer that has used this plugin alternative, called Pods for years and expounded on its virtues. One of the big benefits, especially for just trying it out is that, well, it’s free! Anyone (like myself) that still marvels at WordPress itself being free, this plugin is following in those footsteps, by sticking with the ‘it’s free’ adage! Pods earns a few bonus points for getting some support and backing by none other than Automatic, so ya know it has to be worth a look!
Rebekah showed us the Pods user interface and demonstrated it’s usage with some off the cuff examples. Not to be one-sided, she mentioned just a few pain points of which I will note below, but first the good stuff…
The virtues of Pods
Some of the benefits of Pods besides being free (did I mention that?) are that you can extend existing custom post types in a way that allows one to further categorize and present data. One can also use different ‘related’ to fields to build out more complex relationships that can be outputted on the front end by the user. The ‘related to’ capability might even be even more extensive than other plugins which aid in the creation of custom post types; so this is an area where Pods shines.
Search queries are faster with data created by Pods because the data resides outside of the normal post data, in it’s own table so that helps with the speed since there’s not as much to ‘query through’.
Pods utilizes ‘magic tags’ so that data can be pulled in without hand coding custom PHP archive pages, the plugin does all of the heavy PHP lifting for you! Other custom field plugins require extensive knowledge of PHP.
There is free support with a Slack channel and much of the plugin and their site is made by volunteers. It is still being developed but due to the volunteer nature sometimes development takes a while. The only other con is that to date there is no repeatable field yet, but that is supposed to be added in the future.
In conclusion, as Rebekah stated this is a great plugin if you need to create or extend post types and do not want to write PHP code. This was a very interesting presentation and we are thankful for Rebekah for sharing her knowledge of how she uses Pods every day in her successful freelance business!