Pods

I love Custom Post Types. (Need more info on what a Custom Post Type is? I wrote a blog post about it.) CPTs combined with Beaver Themer gives you endless options for displaying content.

There are a variety of CPT plugins you can use, or you can hard code them into your theme as well. I’ve used a lot of them, including CPT UI and Toolset, but recently I discovered PODS and I’m in love! Lots of people already know about PODS, and I’d heard of it before, but I tend to be loyal to those tried and true options so I never got around to testing it out.

But for some reason, I decided to give it a whirl and I’m glad I did.

Things I like:

  • It’s free. I like free plugins! You can find it in the repository, install and activate. Easy peasy.
  • It’s easy. Once it’s activated, you just add new your new Pod (aka CPT) and go. You can pick what features you want, title, body, featured image, etc and save your pod and you’re ready to rock.
  • It has advanced options. If the basics aren’t enough for you, you can add more features with ease. Custom taxonomies, page attributes and more.

My favorite thing:

It has custom fields baked in. I am a long-time user of Advanced Custom Fields. It’s a great plugin. But with Pods, I don’t need it anymore. I can add my pod, add in all the custom fields I need and they all are magically attached to my CPT. It’s so easy.

Okay, that might not be my favorite thing. It’s great, but my favorite thing is how easily it integrates with Beaver Themer. I’m a long-time, dedicated user of Beaver Builder, and the introduction of Beaver Themer rocked my world. Building fancy templates with ease was great, but now I can custom style my CPTs too? Awesome!

Using Pods and Beaver Themer, I can create a custom template for my CPT and populate the template with information from my custom fields. This task has gone from one of my least favorites to my absolute favorites. I LOVE creating custom CTP templates now. And my clients love being able to easily enter their posts information and have perfectly styled posts.

Don’t get me wrong, CPTUI and ACF are both great plugins, and I’m not dropping them from my stack. But I’m definitely adding in Pods on more and more sites going forward.

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Amy Masson, Web Developer
Owner/Developer

Amy Masson

Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.

2 Comments

  1. Joshua on November 13, 2022 at 12:29 am

    Hey, it’s been four years since you posted this. Do you still use Pods today? Just starting to look into custom post types. I use Bricks Builder, which claims to work with Pods, and I want to give my clients a way to edit website content without needing to learn how to use that page editor. I did notice on WPHive’s website Pods is said to use about 1.3 MB of RAM on average. That’s a lot of memory in my opinion, but worth it if it can do what I want.

    Your thoughts today?

    • Amy Masson on November 13, 2022 at 10:00 am

      I do! It just keeps getting better and better. As a dedicated Beaver Builder user, the integration with Beaver Builder and particularly Beaver Themer makes it extraordinarily useful for me.

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