Perhaps the best WordPress plugin

I have used pods extensively for several years, and consider it to be one of the most important WordPress plugins. It is reminiscent of CCK for Drupal, and is hugely helpful in making sophisticated, maintainable sites.

If you’re an end user who needs out of the box functionality, more specific plugins are probably the way to go. But if you’re a developer making none-trivial sites, Pods can be a huge asset.

Pods helps me as a developer to break down the site in to different types of content, and give the site admins the ability to input and maintain their own data easily. I can keep the html and css cleanly separated from the content, so the user never has to worry about it.

It’s then possible to change how and where content is used, without having to go back through the whole site. We can also extend existing WordPress structures – adding some extra fields to a user profile for example, or a post.

For developers making custom sites, Pods can let you replace a raft of other plugins. Where you would otherwise have a plugin for many different functions – each with their own peculiarities – now you can simply create a structure in pods, and write some code to display that content. You’re not constrained by someone else’s implementation, and nor is your site bloated by features you don’t need. If you want an audio clip with a geolocation – that’s a couple of fields. Want an image with it? Add another field. Don’t want a description field or tags? Don’t add them. You create the whole thing, but it’s a fraction of the development effort that it would be doing it from scratch.

Pods is not perfect by any means – I have had plenty of frustrating moments. Often it seems to pull huge data structures when I just want the bare minimum, etc. But the pros massively outweigh the cons.