#57: Custom Post Types using Pods Framework w/ Scott Clark

Hey everybody, and thanks for joining us on the drunken UX podcast this evening on episode number this morning this afternoon for all I know, depending on where you are at night This is episode number 57 and we’re going to be talking about custom post types in WordPress along with the pods framework plugin that is brought to you so lovingly by developer and and good friend of the show although I just met him Scott Clark, I am your host, Michael Fienen

I am not too bad. It’s still a little cold here, but we’re about to get into the nice weather. Maybe I’ll go outside and record an episode one of these nights. That’s not my you know, and that would be fun. It’s mombi noise or something. Yeah, right on. Okay, so there’s there’s an idea. Maybe we’ll get some mint juleps and sit on the

Folks. If you are enjoying the drunken UX podcast, be sure to run by our sponsors over at New cloud. You can check them out at New cloud.com slash drunken UX if you have any kind of mapping needs interactive map system is what they have or illustration services or other things there. Go go check them out this evening. You can find us in social places,

for early sign up you just go there and it says sign in go in this evening, yo like this there and my drink for this evening is the balvenie 14 year Caribbean cask. Oh my, my nice sweet boy. God I love this bottle and I don’t get it often enough it’s actually a little hard to find in this area. So when I get the chance to grab when I usually do,

so it’s finished. It’s I believe it’s aged 12 years. And then the final two years it’s finished in Caribbean rum casks. Whoo, you get a really nice sweet note kind of on the tail end of it. If you’ve had that one of my other favorites, the Glenfiddich, 21, the grand Reserva, that’s a similar to 21 year that is also finished in rum casks. Okay, but it’s got that same that brown Sugar flavor Really? Yes. Three wanna in a really nice way?

Rec. Oh the like a villain.

I yeah if you can find the Caribbean caskets I know you’ve said before you like balvenie so Oh I know what that is I can tell just from the neck for roses

that would probably be odd with just about any with that point.

lie. I kinda love cream soda.

So there’s an article over@design.com so the title of this article though, caught my eye. It’s Indian designers dismiss design school propaganda as they decolonize their work. Hmm. This really was something that I thought, you know, sounded interesting on its face and I went through and I read the article. I recommend if you are into design Or UX in any capacity. This is worth going and reading about. If you do any kind of international work, we think in terms of UX and design in a very American Way and we teach it in a very American Way here in the States at least. And we don’t always stop to think a lot about how you know trends and influences and such are different especially and where I’m going to lean into this is specifically a non Latin based alphabets cultures with you know, non Latin Arabic style letters and numbers. Because, for whatever reason, those cultures evolved very different systems of writing different systems of communication, and they have very distinct You know, when you think about Indian artwork and architecture, and Japanese artwork and architecture, Mongolian to, you know, the Middle East, these areas developed very distinctive design systems as a culture. And we don’t give enough, I think attention to that, as designers. So this is it’s it’s a very interesting article in that sense. And this phrase that comes up a lot in it decolonize they talk a lot about how, you know, European and specifically British influences weigh very heavily in an area like India, which was colonized, for lack of a better word for a better part of their modern history. But they still have a lot of very distinctly Indian styles and techniques. What makes me really think about this is we design websites for our Japanese offices, and I’ve ran into this exact thing there where we get designed cops and we talked about you know, The patterns involved in the things that go into it. And I realized that I, I’ll be talking with our stakeholders about something. And they’ll say, No, this is how we want it for our audience. And it goes against what I know as a, you know, somebody who cares about design and UX. But it’s a very different, you know, cultural expectation for their website.

it goes on right after that to talk about how the way they solve some of those problems was they went out and talked to the Farmers, like they literally sat down with them. And they did the thing that we always preach, which is go talk to your users. Yeah, it’s such an interesting and involved topic. And quite frankly, the article isn’t deep enough for me like I want to go out and now find some of the other stuff. There’s several things mentioned in it that I want to go read now. I even think about it from the standpoint of keyboards, right? When you think about the way we designed keyboards, and the QWERTY keyboard, obviously designed for a Latin alphabet designed, you know, to accommodate the English language. And even for something like Japanese. What ends up happening is they’ve taken the like, the hiragana character set, which is 46 characters, versus 26 for us, and yet they crowbarred into the QWERTY layout, right, like even though we’ve adapted the hair gonna character set to the keyboard, we’re still expecting them to type in a way That is very much a reflection of the Anglo and euro centric language. And

There’s if you do some googling on it, you can search up a kanji keyboard. And yeah, and that’s a mind Bender, because kanji there are, aren’t there like thousands of Yes, 4000 lifts that ultimately make up congi katakana and hiragana are both I think, like 46 to 50 characters. It’s

and it’s meant to be you know, more of a phonetic representation of the word. So there’s, and there’s a bunch of stuff about how that gets translated when it’s typed and stuff and they’ve got like I caught a kanji

Open your mind a little bit, make sure you’re always thinking a little bit bigger than maybe you need to go check out this article and think about how an international audience impacts the things you build and how your design patterns especially if they are very, you know, American centric, or something like that. Think about how international audiences play into that. And go look at some websites from those areas. That’s also the thing that will really open your mind up to the different expectations of those audiences. Yeah. So next up, I want to get into custom post types and I thought who better to come on here then probably the the developer of what is arguably the best custom post type plugin for WordPress. Mr. Scott Clark. He is the lead product developer over at modern tribe. He’s also a product lead developer for the pods framework plugin. Scott, thanks for sitting down with us. Are you doing this evening man?

So let’s, let’s start at the start because that’s always the best place when we dive into these things. And when I say WordPress, I think pretty much everybody understands what WordPress is as a content management system and how it exists when you launch it, which is a, you know, a very bland, it’s the 2020 theme. It’s you have posts, you have pages, you have menus and very little else going on the media library. But tonight is about custom post types. And so custom post types are a function of WordPress that let you add more. So maybe Posts and Pages aren’t enough. That’s the default of what WordPress ships with when a page Even though pages are in a different part of WordPress, they are functionally nothing more than a post with a different name. And they’re presented a little differently. But that’s only by convention, you can change the way that stuff is viewed. And you could have pages that are exactly like blog posts if you wrote your theme to act that way. And so, when WordPress hit 3.0, a decade ago, as a matter of fact, in in 2010, WordPress finally went, you know, we’re reaching bigger people are trying to use WordPress to do a lot of stuff that is not just a blog, is remember WordPress started out as just a blogging platform. It was meant to just post writing. And so in 2010, they finally released the custom post API. And this is sort of what open the doors, you know, so to speak, open the floodgates to what we could really start doing in WordPress goes Prior to that, and Scott, you you’ve mentioned this name and it, it brought I’m not gonna say bad memories just interesting. But flutter was one of the really early players kind of in that space to customize stuff and and get your back in do things that WordPress wasn’t doing. And I Man, I wish I could remember what I was using it for that far back, but I distinctly remember using that flutter plugin to do a lot of that and that was what we had. Right That was we had these sort of hacky attempts to make WordPress be something that didn’t want to be at that point. Yeah, well,

boxes for a different thing.

Yeah. So in a very abstract sense, what the custom post types allowed you to do was to start setting up these silos that would self contain different types of content. Right, so thinking about like, maybe you wanted to have job postings on your website, maybe you you have an econ platform, and so you need product listings or you were just saying a podcast episode. The way our website works and the way the feed and everything is generated podcast episodes for drunken UX or just a custom post type within our WordPress installation. And so

it’s I it’s really not a secret because most people don’t and shouldn’t ever run a podcast the way we do.

Yeah, because that’s not already up. Those are those french fries or drumsticks in your mouth? I don’t remember. really

not better. So, the the thing is, and I say custom post types, let people silo this content. It was let’s call it a soft silo. Because the reality is all content in WordPress exists within the WP posts table. And this is just a giant table that the only thing that differentiates blog posts from a job posting is just the post type value that’s on it. And so this table exists. And that’s maybe one of the weaknesses still of that system, which is if you’ve got this huge site where you’ve got, you know, 1000 jobs posted and 50,000 products posted, you know, it’s all going into this same one bucket. And that’s something right Scott pods actually came out and built a feature to help address specifically that, didn’t they? Yeah,

So why, what is the disadvantage to having all this post type data in one table? And I know you’ve got a feature in pods that lets you put this into a separate table. Why would somebody do that in one case, versus just letting WordPress do it the way they want to do it?

and that’s why WordPress has all those helpers, right? All these helper functions for running queries and all this because they’re trying to when you do a query posts or WP query, they’re part of what they’re trying to do is abstract away the complexity of what that actually database query looks like when you have to start getting into the ugly you saying all of this, the WP post meta is the table where all of this additional information gets stored for these. So if you’re querying by title and some abstract field, it’s you know, there’s all these there’s joins. There’s all this stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but it certainly, yeah, efficiency becomes something of a bottleneck for big site. Small sites never noticed this, but certainly at a big site, cuz that’s the thing, right? WordPress, when WordPress was a blog, when all WordPress was this really cool tool that let you throw, throw up a couple static pages and write your blog posts. They simply didn’t need a lot of flexibility. And then folks started coming along and they said, you know, this thing’s really easy to set up, I can run it on any kind of hosting. And with a couple tweaks, I can actually run normal C or like a normal website on it like this was a full fledged CMS and that’s Where WordPress started saying, you know, maybe we need to open up some pipelines so to speak, you know, it’s it’s still ships very simply. But, you know, by version three, they were saying, Yeah, maybe it’s time for us to start accommodating some of these folks, because, you know, we see some of that future and what’s going to happen. The thing is like and talking this, the reality is, I honestly don’t remember the last time I built a WordPress site and didn’t need to do a custom post type in it. That need is just too large for the most part, and you always run in if it’s not something I’m putting in. It’s a plugin that is going to add one, you know, if you use anything that has sliders, you shouldn’t be but you got to have carousel slides. And so those are oftentimes a new post type of you know that let’s say that we use a seriously simple podcast. Is the plugin that we use to help road drunk UX. It’s not a secret. It’s literally a plugin, you can go get for free. Ah, but it creates a custom post type for podcast episodes. It’s you know, there’s all of this complexity there that you need to run. But it’s not hard and that’s where all of this stuff starts to come to a head. Creating cook custom post types isn’t particularly difficult. Out of the box, it does require coding and if you’re not comfortable with PHP, it can be a little daunting. It all comes back to function that’s called register post type. I’ll throw some documentation links in the show notes. But that’s sort of the magic sauce that makes it custom post type exist. There are a couple generators I do recommend if you want to use vanilla code and stick it in your functions dot php file. Generate WP com has a really good post generator WP dash hasti.com. Both of those have interactive web based generators that you just answer the questions, you fill out the form fields. And then it generates the PHP code that you need to stick in your functions file, so that you can have, whatever custom post types you need. There are certainly plugins that will take care of this. One of the bigger ones is custom post type UI, install it, turn it on, and it just has an interactive visual editor in the back end of WordPress. And so what it does, is it you do the exact same thing you would do with those two websites, you tell it what kind of post type it is you answer the questions, it stores all that information in the database. And when WordPress spins up, it does all the registering and it just does it in an automated fashion as opposed to running from static code. But on top of all those is why Scott is here tonight, which is the pod plugin which is, in my mind the hands down. It’s the plugin I’ve been using since about 2012, I think is when I first launched with it. I had a gaming website that I was building and I needed. I needed a custom post types. But I also wanted to do front end content submission. And pause was one of the few plugins that supported that natively without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. And so, pods is sort of the big player on the block that takes all of these needs all of these different features, and has been doing it fantastically for the last 12 years. If it sounds familiar. We did bring up pods back on episode 53. So that would have been the first episode of the year.

The I mentioned there and our warmer topic for that episode involved. The news that automatic was diverting their funding to other projects away from pods because pods was getting some support from automatic at that point in time. And so right this sounds familiar. This is the same. Yeah, same platform. Yeah, I was like, I think I feel like I’ve heard about this before, but it could remember where we’ve been around 12 years, man.

that I will vouch for that. Yes, it has. So Scott, let’s, let’s go back. Let’s go back to the 28 2008 2010. That area. How did you get started working with pods framework?

Anybody who wants to get into development, you know, the sort of magic sauces to where where do I start to find something that interests you? And, you know, go find a project that’s out there and Just start reading about it and submit that first ticket and learn a little bit more about it and then submit a fix. And it’s like, it’s the perfect way to sort of get yourself hooked into something meaningful. If you’re just starting out or trying to figure out, you know, how do I build that portfolio? You know, things like that, that there are, there is a project for anybody out there, just start helping because they all need volunteers, they everybody, you know, is looking for a little extra help even, even if it’s writing documentation, you know, there’s please a lot of that.

Yeah. First and foremost, one of the big advantages to pods is you take all the coding off the table. You don’t have to write PHP functions. You don’t have to labor through all the different keys and arguments and all of that that you need. You don’t have to write up the custom field support or anything like that. It’s all pointing click, basically, in the backend, you’ve got a UI that does pretty much everything. I liken it a little bit to advanced custom fields, because I think maybe some folks may have a little familiarity with that. acf is a great plugin. It does one thing really, really well I think, which is allow you to add different custom fields to post types. But it does not itself, create the post types. And you don’t need ACF, if you have pods because pods already has the support for I think it’s like 18 different field types, right? It’s, it’s like a ridiculous number.

you’ve built in your whole, your own template tag language, right? That you’re able, when you set up one of those templates, you just say I am going to reference my author field here, my, you know, my location, address, field or whatever, and it’ll just spit it out. If you want it to be in a definition list, you just write the HTML for definition list and leave these variables, these template tags in there. And it’ll spit it out when, like you say the content basically renders for your page.

and you can do all this of course with vanilla code that is entirely possible. But it’s a whole lot more work in those situated

drink, drink some more whiskey. Try and get the villains out of that cask. The reason I say because I’m I’m actually especially as I have, let’s say matured, rather than aged, as a developer, I have increasingly become vanilla minded, like, I am the kind of person I’m like, I don’t want to use jQuery for anything. I just want to write JavaScript that just works. And I’ve gotten that way with PHP a lot as well. Like, I’m not going to use a plugin for something. I’m not going to include Tag Manager with a Tag Manager plugin. I’m just going to write a quick hook in in WordPress to you know, output the HTML for it. But this is one area where I’m like, yeah, nah. I like the quickness and the speed which which, even if it’s just prototyping some of this stuff out, I may go back in and decide, I’m going to build an actual template part in my theme for something. But this lets me get in there really quickly get the post type in there. And I can at least do some rapid prototyping with it, see how it looks in space in some occasions. And sometimes it’s just like, No, we’ll just leave it it looks good. Now, one of the other big things Aaron, you brought this up a few minutes ago about Tags and Categories. And pods helps with that as well. So you’ve got custom post types, you’ve got custom fields, you’ve got the relational side of things, but you also have support for the custom taxonomies which I think is important to mention, because when you start getting in to custom post types, inevitably you run into I want this post type to have a different set of categories available to it. I don’t want it to use my blogs categories. Good example. Sorry, I’m gonna reveal more of our secrets. I use a custom taxonomy for guests on our podcast.

I’m Jesus I’m just asking for it here that lets me though tight into our speakers tool on the on the episode so that whenever we have guests on, they are flagged as a speaker in the episode so that like an iTunes and all of that they get picked up as an actual speaker and some other services as well identify that but also on the web page. It lists out you know, who’s the speaker on this episode? So if you wanted to see all the episodes that we’ve had a particular person on, you could click their name and get those episodes because just a category basically as a taxonomy, and I think that’s something that is tell people are password Well,

you So the username to come on admin. Give me an idea. This is a dumb question. But I want to ask it how long from like 2008. I know how version one ran until about was 2013 2014 2000.

We I yeah, I do remember that. Yeah,

The killer feature for me that that really, especially when it came time for me to get off that old flutter plugin was the front end content submission. That was the real game changer. I think public forums. Yeah, trying to take in user submitted content for a game so somebody, it’s Aaron and Scott can see my bookshelf behind me, I’ve got all these role playing books. And so I’ve got this website that I had built out that people can go in and submit, you know, I made this creature I made this piece of equipment or whatever. And so I wanted a way for users of the site to have a page they could go to and submit their creations to it. And at that point in time, that was really hard to do and WordPress. Because we didn’t have the REST API yet, like that didn’t exist at that point in time. So you had to write all your own admin functions and all of this stuff that would go through take the form data, process it, save it. The the irony of pods to me is, you know, I’m always wary of like the tools that try to do everything because it’s like one of those things where you either do one thing well or everything, you know, badly, so to speak. But pods really came in here and tried to own this space of here’s how to create a custom post type and all of the things associated with it. And it really does it better than anybody else and to say, well, that’s hard to pull off in this day and age because the tool itself and if you if folks go grab it, it’s you can get it right from the the plugin warehouse at WordPress, install it and start looking through it. There is a ton of stuff in it like it is a huge plugin. And yet, it just works. It just works. so smoothly, which is killer. I want to talk real quick about sort of how this episode sort of catalyze together so to speak. And I mentioned we talked about this in Episode 53. And that automatic had originally and as you brought up after the Kickstarter automatic stepped in, said, Hey, this is cool. We like what it’s doing. We think it extends WordPress in a good way. So we’re going to support that. And then earlier this year, in January, a blog post came out on the pods blog that said, Hey, automatic is, you know, changing their strategy with funding projects. They’re going to, you know, more Gutenberg centric funding model for who they’re supporting. And unfortunately, that has left pods somewhat out in the cold unfortunately.

So if you go it’s brens.pods.io is the site if you go there, you can check out how to sign up and do all that. There are incentives to this as well, which I thought were pretty neat. So one, everyone’s The first one is I think, really classic one, donate your your five bucks a month or whatever it is, and you get a vote on feature priority. Yeah, that I mean, that’s kind of killer unto itself, because The people you know if it as long as it’s worth something to you, it means you have a voice in, hey, I’m using this plugin for these things. And it’s like, I would like to see this in it. That’s how you’re, you know, the cream rises, so to speak. And so

Yeah. The other thing is you’ve got partnerships with a bunch of vendors, right? Like, I started looking at the list and the list was incredible. Long were there were host web hosts, plugin vendors themes, you know, like backup services and all of this that if you end up backing it, I think your silver or gold level, right, you get certain perks out of that pile that can save you money. So you spend a little bit of money on pods, but you can save money then on your hosting service with WP engine or something like that.

pad your bid, buy an extra $10. At least it doesn’t have to come out of your pocket, then have the client, add another $10 on to that payment, and pass that along. You know, if you’re bidding out, you know, 5000 bucks to build a website, that extra 10 bucks out of that isn’t gonna make any difference to you or the client. But it can make a heck of a difference to all of these developers out there that advertise or not advertise that volunteer their time. I know GitHub, I think and I don’t know if you guys have looked at this, Scott. I know GitHub is starting like a, you know, a Patreon kind of

Let me ask the big final question to all of this. What’s next? What is what what’s on the horizon for pods? What’s your next big target that you hope to hit?

awesome, dude. Thanks for sitting down with us and talking about this. We’re going to take just a couple minutes here and get a word from our sponsors in and then we will come back and say bye bye and To all of those things. The drunken UX podcast is brought to you by our friends at New cloud. New cloud is an industry leading interactive map provider who has been building location based solutions for organizations for a decade. Are you trying to find a simple solution to provide your users with an interactive map of your school, city or business? Well, new clouds interactive map platform gives you the power to make and edit a custom interactive map in just minutes. They have a team of professional cartographers who specialize in map illustrations of many different styles and are ready to design and artistic rendering to fit your exact needs. One map serves all of your users devices with responsive maps that are designed to scale and blend in seamlessly with your existing website. To request a demonstration or to view their portfolio, visit them online at New cloud.com slash drunken UX. That’s cloud.com slash drunken UX. Scott, man, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with us and talk about this. I’m really excited actually about what’s coming for pods. I’m enthusiastic that we can maybe through this episode help find maybe a couple more backers for the friends program. maybe one or two of them is on the show as we speak. Man,

we will have a link in the show notes as well to that to make sure that folks know how to find that. Scott, take a second the microphone is yours. tell folks where they can find you what you got going on or anything else that you want to know about you?

Awesome, everybody. Thanks for tuning in this week. As always, you can find us on twitter or facebook at slash drunken UX. If you want to join us on slack. It’s drunken UX calm slash slack. or check us out on Instagram. We like sharing what we’re drinking or what’s coming up or show announcements or little snippets from behind the scenes there. instagram.com slash drunken UX podcast, little twist on the name, but still very easy to find. It’s not my fault. Somebody else has are the name I want. And I guess it wasn’t mine. Somebody had my name and usually Fienen that’s why even isn’t easy when I’m feeling On Twitter I’m Fienen on Facebook, LinkedIn all the places Instagram Fienen was gone so

for it there they have like no posts. It’s just somebody squatting on the account that’s it makes me sad. Why

Folks, if you feel so inclined to take a second drop into iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher wherever you listen to us, drop us a rating or review, hit the like button, do whatever helps us out the only thing second of your time if you feel so inclined, leave us a review. That’s even better. But I’m not going to bake it I’m going to tell you is that there’s one piece of advice that helps you out day in day out whether you’re a designer, a developer, a UX professional, whatever the case, and that is, keep your personas close, folks, your users