The details surrounding Pods 2.0 have been unleashed! If you’ve never used Pods before (what?!) you’ll be super interested in what’s coming in 2.0!
Pods is a CMS framework. That is to say it’s a plugin that facilitates the creation of a very detailed content management system using WordPress at its core. The combination of the two results in an extremely customizable and powerful CMS that both clients and servers will love.
Things are going to get even better in the next version of Pods. Instead of simply creating its own custom content types, Pods 2.0 is going to extend WordPress objects themselves. This is mind blowing to be. Instead of creating standalone Pods from the ground up, you’ll be able to base them on WordPress native objects such as Pages and Custom Post Types.
With that change not only comes a lot of built in benefits of native WordPress functionality, the extensibility and platform for rapid development is quite simply ridiculous. You’ll be able to roll your own content types easier than before, and they’ll be built on top of the WordPress platform itself.
That’s just the beginning. The roadmap for Pods 2.0 is huge. Another aspect I’m greatly looking forward is a UI revamp. Our goal with 2.0 is to align Pods as closely as possible to the styles and conventions set forth in WordPress herself.
Pods 2.0 is scheduled to launch in parallel with WordPress 3.1 and we think you’re going to love it. In my personal opinion Pods 2.0 is arguably the biggest thing to happen to WordPress for me than Pods 1.0. We hope you feel the same way, stay tuned!
To keep up to date on the roadmap, be sure to check out the Pods 2.0 page on podscms.org, follow @podscms on Twitter (as well as the core devs), and don’t forget to pop into #podscms and chat with us about what you’d like to see in Pods!
Comments
Very excited to hear about these plans for Pods 2.0. The simplicity of WP combined with the power of Pods is truly a great fit for many of my clients, and it sounds like the next version will take that to the next level.
I’m really trying to get my head around what the changes in Pods 2.0 will mean, but I’m not quite there yet. What does it mean to “attach” a pod to a custom post type or custom taxonomy? What additional functionality will be available or how will performance be improved? Do you have any examples?
Knowing what 2.0 will bring, if you were developing a site today that might not launch until after 2.0 is released, would you build it using custom post types and then attach pods to them, or would you build it with pods and then upgrade/migrate them to the 2.0 framework later?
Hey Paul, great questions! Basically, if you can imagine Custom Post Types you know that you need to create your own meta boxes, your own fields, and handle the saving/retrieval of this data. Pods 2.0 is going to do that for you. You’ll be able to create data structures and extend (for example) Custom Post Types with those fields. That handles things on the admin side, but things will also be made easier when pulling the data to your theme too! You’ll now be able to use Pods functionality within The Loop to retrieve the data you’re working with. Does that help explain it a bit?
We plan on incorporating as much migration assistance as possible, so by all means go forth working with Pods today. Keep in mind though, that on a technical level there’d be nothing wrong with leaving a completed Pods 1.* site as is and opting out of the 2.0 upgrade. Everything will be backed up should you decide to upgrade to 2.0, but if things don’t work out as expected you should be able to roll back without a problem, touch base with the Pods dev team, and get things worked out for a migration ASAP.
Hope that helps, but please relay any further questions you may have.
Thanks so much for the additional explanation. I took some time over the weekend to explore this further and the “light” finally went on.
The problem was that I understood regular posts and pages, and I understood Pods, but I had some misconceptions about custom post types (and from what I have seen around the web, I’m not alone). Turns out they provide a lot less functionality than I had assumed. Many of the custom post type introductions and tutorials around do a good job of playing up what custom post types can do, but they don’t point out what they can’t do (or can’t do well or without a lot of extra work) which leads people to think they can do everything.
In a nutshell, if you’ve got a project where the content can be adequately stored and displayed using a simple post-like object plus custom taxonomies (i.e. the objects share common pre-defined attributes like “brand”, “type”, “color”, etc.), then custom post types will probably be fine. However, if you’re working with content that has many custom or individual attributes (e.g. “weight”, “width”, “length”, “latitude”, “longitude”, etc.) then you’re probably better off with something like Pods. Of course there are always exceptions to every rule depending on the particulars.
Fortunately, not only do I now understand better how to proceed with my own project, I’m really starting to see the incredible potential of Pods 2.0! Thanks again for your help and all of the great articles and tutorials here at Monday By Noon.
Cant wait for PODS 2.0. Any idea where that page went that you are linking to in this post? http://podscms.org/pods-2-0/
I’m looking for the missing Pods 2-0 link page as well.
Ahhh….
Link should be to http://dev.podscms.org/pods-2-0/
@Paul, try http://dev.podscms.org/pods-2-0/
AJ
Hey Jonathan,
Any idea if the new version of Pods will roll in some analytics? I’ve heard rumblings that the new WordPress proper will allow viewing of top authors and their stats. Will Pods also include this sort of info?
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Hello,
I just discovered Pod and I have to admit I’m a little bit excited. Is there any plan to include the possibility to link post types together such as in scribu’s post2post plugin?