I have used Pods.io for easy handling of custom post types for WordPress. It makes it easy for other users to change how the content is displayed and create new post types by using a fairly well designed GUI. I can edit the page templates from the Pods Admin dashboard and I don’t get confusing looks when I try and explain the fundamentals of the register_post_type() function.
All in all, Pods has just made it easy for me to customize WordPress and make it easy for a basic user to maintain. However, they have started to get a bit sloppy with documentation for the last few updates. This came as a shock to me when suddenly the educational content on my Hack-E-Bot website was not showing up correctly.
The Pods Admin has a section called Pages and that is were I can create new custom PHP templates for handling the new post types. This is supposed to work like creating a new Page Template.PHP file, and it did, but now it stopped pulling the header.php and ignored the CSS all together even though they were both clearly referenced in the template. Something may have auto updated and messed it all up because things were working just perfect until a few days ago.
I sat down to try and fix the issue and things just were not working the way they should and most of the documentation was from 2012, so no help there. I gave up on making it work the old way and rigged it up so that it is at least displaying correctly. It took me about 2 hours to get everything to link correctly, but I got it fixed now.
What really irritates me though is stuff that just stopped working with no explanation or alternatives in the Pods.io documentation. You are supposed to be able to call a single post of a particular post type by using:
// Get the Pods object for a specific item $mypod = pods( 'mypod', $id_or_slug );
However that dose not work any more. I had to use the following method to find my single post:
// Get the Pods object and run find()
$params = array(
'limit' => 1,
'where' => 'post_name ="'.$thePost.'"'
);
$mypod = pods( 'mypod', $params );
It’s not such a big code change for me, but if I had know that the first method was retired I would not have bothered to troubleshoot it and just switch to the second method.
It is a shame because now I feel that I should start moving away from using Pods and find a new plugin or just make my own. Time will be the deciding factor I am afraid, and I just have to little time these days.
Oh well, slap a bandage on it and live to fight another day.