Once upon a time there was a project that needed the functionality of Drupal, but had to be made with Wordpress. Before going into detail: yes … there is a happy ending to this story. The project in question and Wordpress lived happily ever after.
What does Drupal have over Wordpress?
Custom fields and content types, thats it! With those 2 extra options you can do a lot of fancy stuff.
Pods
Pods lets you create, manage, and display custom content types using WordPress. Like Drupal CCK, these content types can relate to one another, allowing for sites packed with interconnectedness. Automatic pagination, filtering, public forms, access control, menu editing and more are possible with the Pods CMS plugin.
Here’s a basic overview of the features:
- Create new content types, called Pods.
- Each Pod has a list of custom field types to ensure structured data entry.
- Pods can be structured to require entry of specific fields and to validate the entered data.
- Pods can be relational by creating connections between a field in one Pod to a field in another Pod.
- Create templates for each Pod that describe how the data is shown in different views.
With this plugin for Wordpress you can do stuff like you would do in Drupal, but in the Wordpress way of working. Everything is in one place, you don’t have to change options on several locations like you have to in Drupal for instance.
You can relate content
For our project we needed images, videos and mp3s for each content type. So I made all those content types, and later on I made a new content type which allows me to pick those images, videos and mp3s. That is called Pod-relationship.
Templating system
You can specify what the list view or detail view should look like by typing the HTML directly in the list view or detail view field. O wait, that’s not all … You can easily bypass all those built-in templating systems by specifying each field and the value you want to show on the page.
Helpers
A display helper’s purpose is to modify a column’s value before outputting it to the user.
In our case, we needed the date of the event to be translated into Dutch. The days of the week had to be spelled completely, as well as the months. That’s where helpers come in.
Helpers are snippets of PHP-code. You can add those helpers to your field value and Pods will take care of parsing the code.
Also because at Nascom we want to go for correct XHTML (The intern wysiwyg editor still needs to be fixed to output correct code), we needed the embedded youtube movies code to be transformed into correct crossbrowser XHTML code. I simply made a helper to do that.
Search
That was the difficult part I must admit, because that is one thing the developers of Pods haven’t done yet, or haven’t thought about. The standard Wordpress search doesn’t search in the Pod database.
Hacking into the core of Wordpress is of course not an option (if you update your Wordpress, hacks are bye bye)
Together with a colleague we found a way to use the Pod system itself to perform the search functionality. This means that if you are planning a Pod site, you don’t need the Wordpress search anymore.
Ever dreamed about doing this kind of stuff with Wordpress? Now you can!
