Fresh

Although I love WordPress, I always wished it provided a better way to have custom page types with their own custom fields.  The built in “Posts” and “Pages” work great for regular blogs, but for a more complex website they aren’t enough.  What about “Portfolio Items”, “Job Listings”, “Events”?  And for a basic brochure site you don’t even need the “Posts” and its placement in the nav just serves to confuse whoever has to manage the website.  Often I will use a “Post” as a different type of page content – but I always have to explain to clients that they have nothing to do with blog posts, so just ignore the name and ‘imagine’ that it’s called something else.

Last year I saw a demonstration of the Expression Engine CMS presented by Josh Pyles of Pixelmatrix Design.  I drooled over its ability to create different page types with their own custom fields, all presented in a beautiful UI.  I ogled and stared and sighed and wished that WordPress could do the same thing.  One of my favorite plugins, More Fields, could add some of that custom field functionality, but without custom page types and the beautiful UI.

Last week I finally had a chance to play around with the newly released, highly anticipated WordPress 2.7.   The new UI and navigation structure impressed me, as did its ease of use.  I love how I can get where I need to with minimal clicking.  But even more exciting than WP 2.7 is the updated version of the More Fields plugin.  Here’s a representation of how I felt when I first started exploring the features of the new More Fields:  (imagine him saying “custom page types!!!” instead of “Nintendo 64!!!”)

OK, so maybe that’s a bit of exaggeration.  But I was excited.  I think I may have even pumped my fist and said “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

The new More Fields plugin allows you to create those custom page types, based on either the default Page or Post page type.  You can still create custom fields like with the old plugin, but now you can assign fields to specific page types.  You also have complete control of which content boxes appear on your custom page type, or even the default page types:  If you want, you can remove the Tags, Categories, Authors, Excerpt, Discussion, or any other box on the edit page.  You can also set a default category for the specific page type.

For example, if you have a page type “Event”, you can set the category as “event” and then remove the category select box from the edit page so that the category can’t be changed on accident. You can also get rid of any other boxes on the edit screen that aren’t relevant.  You can add custom fields for Event Date and Venue, and not have to worry about them also appearing on any other page type (say, your static ‘About Page’).

If you also have different types of “Post”-type content, you can also create various page types based on Posts.  Maybe you have a “Photo Post” with a default category of “photo” and custom fields for Camera information, Date Taken, etc.  Those custom fields won’t show up on your “Family Posts”.

The More Fields plugin now has more custom field types than before too.  You can now assign a custom field to use a WYSIWYG editor, instead of being stuck with plain text.  Using the WYSIWYG is also a great way to assign an image to a custom field  (instead of having to copy/paste the image URL to a text field) – for example, assigning a custom thumbnail image to a blog post on your homepage.

OK, that all sounds great right? But I haven’t even gotten to the COOLEST part yet.  More Fields even adds your custom page types to the navigation bar.  You can even go one step further, and remove the default “Page” and “Post” links, and only display your custom page/post types. So you can tweakyour admin area to only display the content types your users will actually need.

The new More Fields plugin is far from perfect though.  Funkiness and inconsistencies abound, at least at the time of this post.  For example, if you decide to keep the default “Page” type, ALL of your custom pages will also appear there.  The same goes for the default “Post” and all of your custom post types.  This is because, according to the WordPress database, all your custom types are still either “Posts” or “Pages”.  But having content listed in two different places may be confusing for some of your users.  If you want to have default “Pages” in your nav, it may be better to create a custom “Page” type and then remove the default from the menu.  The same goes for “Posts”.

I also came across some funkiness if I decided to edit the settings for the default “Page” or “Post”.  More Fields saved the changes I made, but also added another “Page” item in the navigation – which if you neglect to add the plural version in the settings, will show up as an empty “ghost” box in the nav bar.  Also, if you click on Add New in the ghost box, you will get an error because the custom page type doesn’t actually exist – it’s just a duplication of the default.

The current version of the plugin also seems to break the WordPress Media Library and causes it to hide all your previously uploaded files.  Not so good.

But despite the problems, I am very excited about the improvements to More Fields and what it does for WP 2.7.  I’m sure the plugin will only get better and better, and the bugs will be fixed eventually.  More Fields opens up a lot of possibilites for WordPress as a CMS.  Thank goodness for plugin developers like Kal Ström and Henrik Melin. I’ll be sure to send some donations their way for the awesome work they’ve done, and if I continue to use their plugin for client projects, I’ll be encouraging eROI to do the same!