Wordpress has been my weapon of choice for about 2 years and I have seen the system go from being a blogging only application to a good CMS for simple sites, and in the last couple of months I have really been pushing the boundaries with more and more complex sites needing the Wordpress love. It’s not that these sites cant be built on other platforms, it’s just that Wordpress makes life easy! Lots of plug-ins that are easily customizable and an easy user interface to name but a few.

The latest project I worked on World Wide Creative was for a client called Greenside Golf (Golf Punk Magazine anyone?) and this site’s functionality seemed to be out of Wordpress’s reach. My initial reaction was that it could not be done but after some carefull investigation and homework I came across a little gem called Pods (insert harp sound here)

This is a truly amazing plugin that has opened up many doors with my Wordpress development strategy. I mean, you will have to check out their website for all the details but if you look at http://www.greensidegolfworld.com you will see that a lot of funtionality went into the website. Especially the Travel section that was built completely using the Pods plugin. This includes the filters to search content, faux categories and listing by various sort criteria. The most usefull function of Pods does not lie here but in the admin panel. Adding new content into a pod content typ is as easy as addin a page or a post, possibly even easier since the fields that appear on the add content screen are only relative to that specific content type. No longer do we have to teach our clients which hoops to jump through to get the “Add Post” screen to do something specific and say goodbye to custom fields as you know them. Pods add’s it’s own table structure to the Wordpress database. This does however come with some downsides off course since the default Wordpress conditional statements, that I rely on quite heavily, don’t work in Pods (depending on setup)

So there we have it, the options have just opened up with the new kid on the block. Please contact me if you wish to know a bit more about a specific section of the example site that I gave you or you can ask the plugin developers in their active forum (built using pods off course!)