I’ve been using Wordpress + WP Pods for most of my sites. Recently I started shifting some personal sites to Classicpress because WP just seems to get more and more bloated with each update.
However, for my heavier database-driven sites, I’m not so sure. WP Pods doesn’t seem to be supporting ClassicPress (which is strange to me, because IMO a meta-box plugin shouldn’t need to have dependencies above WP 4.9), the last version of WP-Pods that supports classicpress is 2.7.1 (which doesn’t have some of the features I’m using).
After perusing this forum, I came across the recommendation for metabox io - - I’m curious what your experiences have been with this plugin. Is it a drop-in replacement for Pods? My WP-Pods post types have a lot of related fields etc, will those be easy (or possible) to import into metabox io? Are there any migration tools/plugins/scripts I can use?
Welcome @nlk2556 to the community.
I don’t have any experience with metabox, other than knowing that it should work with WordPress 4.8 hence ClassicPress. Your best bet would be to follow their tutorials, which they do offer:
Have you looked at ACF? We use it on our main site, no issues so far. So it should be good too.
One side note, we’re beginning work on re-forking ClassicPress using WordPress 6.x minus the blocks and JSON theme stuff to help bring missing functions, improvements, etc. to ClassicPress. So some plugins requiring WordPress 5.x or 6.x could start working again, as long as they don’t require blocks. So if you can’t find an alternative replacement for Pods and can wait to switch, that could be an option.
A lot of the plugins rely on newer functions, not even block related that ClassicPress doesn’t have. That’s why some don’t fully work with ClassicPress. But, if you have coding skills, you could create a shims plugin to ensure missing functions don’t cause an error when activated. We have an article for that:
With the v2.0 and our new plugin/theme directory, we will go after plugin/theme developers to get them to support ClassicPress and get listed in our directory.
This sounds great, but I was unable to get it working with Pods. Fingers crossed that it’ll work after the re-fork.
have you looked at ACF? We use it on our main site, no issues so far. So it should be good too.
ACF is great but fills up the podsmeta table quite a bit, which is problematic if the DB starts crossing 10-20k posts. So far, WPPods is the only option I’ve come across that can keep the DB size manageable when working with large post databases.
One other option you may consider is CMB2, but it’s geared toward plugin/theme developers.
So I decided to give this another go, using the re-forked classicpress (v 2.3.1).
The plugin itself is installing just fine, and I can edit some of the “Components”.
However, I’m unable to create any new custom post types, or import them.
For reference, this is the plugin:
Clicking on “Create a new Content Type” (or any of the other buttons) seem to have no effect.
This is a fresh Classicpress installation on localhost, made it just to test WP-Pods.
unfortunately the majority of CPT plugins (pods included) do have issues with CP (I think due to block functions).
SCF (secure custom fields) and ACF however do work (they throw warnings for the JQuery libraries that we deprecated but do work).
Since Pods is a very HUGE plugin and working on it to understand why it does not work might be tricky, my advice is to use ACF/SCF that basically provides same features.
If however you are familiar with Pods and like it better, you can try writing to the developer to ask to troubleshot themselves and grant compatibility with CP.
It’s actually very simple to create a custom post type manually. Here’s a guide: How to create WordPress custom post type programmatically
You can essentially copy and paste the code into a new file, then search and replace specific words to get the CPT as you want.
Then put this line at the very top of your file before any other code:
<?php if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) { exit; }
Save the file with a .php extension and upload it to your site’s mu-plugins folder, and you’re done.
Yeah. Using same method. Will add, that ChatGPT can generate all code.
I think all the AI can do it now, I use GitHub copilot and Codeium (in VSCode).
Here is a wp code generator site with custom post types and metabox code generator: