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.