Have you ever wanted to turn WordPress into a more powerful, CMS-style platform? The Pods plugin looks to be the first step toward achieving this goal.

In case you haven’t heard about Pods, here is a snippet from Pods’ site:

WordPress evolved.

Create more than just blog posts and pages. Add new content types with only the fields you need. Customize exactly how each content type’s list and detail pages appear. Automatic pagination, filtering, public forms and more are possible with the Pods CMS plugin.

I first looked at Pods when it was very young and nothing more than a proof of concept. I really should have kept my eye on it as appears to have developed into a great tool.

Here’s a basic overview of the features:

  • Create new content types, called Pods.
  • Each Pod has a list of custom field types to ensure structured data entry.
  • Pods can be structured to require entry of specific fields and to validate the entered data.
  • Pods can be relational by creating connections between a field in one Pod to a field in another Pod.
  • Create templates for each Pod that describes how the data is shown in different views.

In a nutshell, you can now turn WordPress into a flexible relational database. Ever wanted to turn your blog into a Real Estate database? Now you can easily. Would you like to set up WordPress to store and display detailed data about different makes of cars? No sweat, just create a new Pod.

Of course, I say this without having done this myself yet. I’m just trying to share some of the possibilities that I’m sure the creators of Pods hope to provide.

I’ll try out Pods and then post a review.

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