Approach for CPT

Hi, I am pretty new at WordPress. I am a php programmer and supported WP for as a hosting provider in the past, but haven’t delve too much into CPT’s and custom functions, hooks, etc. until recently. I’ve made a couple of shortcodes for a site in functions.php, but that is about as much as I’ve done.

I’m working on a web site for a non-profit radio station and looking for advice on how to start what I believe needs to be a CPT, music playlists. Not a player, just a way for program hosts to enter what they are playing on the air so it shows up on their program page by date. I have a database of the stations music library with albums and tracks and want to provide fields with jQuery to do lookups as they type when entering their playlists.

So, my idea is to create a CPT for Playlists and create these custom fields as needed with a dropdown for the host to select his show. That is a whole other thing, I also need to learn how to restrict someone to a post and not just a CPT, for example, a host can only view and edit his own program page. I’ve seen a lot of control plugins, but nothing with that capability, I’m hoping it can be done once I get to that point. I’ll leave that for another thread.

Anyway, my big question is about how to create the CPT ‘Add New’ and ‘Edit’ pages (forms) with the fields I need. Is using the Toolset (wp-types.com) plugin or CPT UI plugin a good way to go or should I do better making my own CPT, which I should be very capable with instruction, but not sure how to create the specialized fields I’m gonna need in addition to the WP fields like Title. I’ve played around with the plugins and like the plugin approach because as I said, this is a non-profit that would most likely benefit from a GUI driven setup in the future for other hands to tinker and make changes.

If the plugins are not the way to go usually for better control or whatever reason, could someone point me to some docs about how-to create custom fields in my CPT?