Why, What, & How of Custom Post Types with Paul from WPTuts

[Music] hello and welcome to the admin bar the community and podcast connecting the people with the products the lessons the strategies to help push their business forward my name is kyle van duzen from ogil web design just outside of fort worth texas and with me as always is my good buddy and co-host matt sebert from matthew siebert design how's it going today matt it's going well i uh i think the the beginning of this live stream i was talking about the uh the mess behind me but uh i'm currently building something hopefully it'll be finished next weekend so the next uh show won't have a messy background well when you get done with it you'll have to share it with the group because i think it's going to turn out pretty neat yeah if it if it comes out well i'll share it if not we'll just forget it ever happened and i wasted a bunch of money luckily it's in the office so it's all right off but that's true yeah what about you man how's uh how was your your thanksgiving going good i'm glad that black friday stuff's pretty much over it's fun for a little while and then it's just grinding on my nerves so kind of glad all that's done with i got to take all the notices off of every website this morning and just kind of move on back to normal life hopefully but today we are joined for the first time by paul c from wp tuts we uh we connected here recently luckily paul has been super kind and been telling people about the wall very nicely so there's lots of new people in our group uh thanks to paul and probably having a chat with him is long overdue so today we're going to actually be talking about custom post types so that's something paul has done tons of content on and something every time we kind of have threads going about custom post types people seem there there's a faction of people that don't fully understand how it works and i think probably a a a silent group of people that we don't even hear from that are afraid to even ask so i wanted to put together a nice resource for people kind of explaining what our custom post types how they work why you should think about using them in your projects and all that so hello and good afternoon paul how are you doing today man i'm doing very very well kyle thank you very much and thank you very much for inviting me on to the admin bar show it's much appreciated well uh we're lucky that you would uh grace us with your presence today absolutely my pleasure awesome all right well let's uh let's just dig into this so we do we are doing this live on facebook for anybody that's listening to a replay later on uh so we're gonna try to monitor all the comments in here and make sure if people have questions uh that we go back and answer those so definitely if you have questions drop them in the chat matt and i are both trying to keep an eye out on it and we'll try to get to that so i guess first of all let's just start at the beginning uh what is a custom post type and how is it different from just the normal posts that are inside wordpress i suppose the first thing to sort of say is that it's not really any difference to a normal wordpress post type i mean custom post types woocommerce anything like that that you use inside wordpress is a post type simple fact but most people when they want to expand what they can do with something like wordpress which was never really intended to be a content management system an online shop and all the kinds of things that we kind of take for granted that that's what it is these days you know they just basically create custom post types woocommerce custom prototype for the products it's just the same thing you know taxonomies they're just basically ways of grouping your custom post types together tags all the same thing so i think the confusion that kind of lies around a lot when it comes to do with custom post types is the terminology as opposed to the technology so when people start talking about this kind of thing it just adds confusion because what a taxonomies what's the difference between a taxonomy and a tag a tag and a category well really there's no real difference between tags and categories they're just basically ways of grouping your post types together whether they're custom or their wordpress so you just have some tools like custom post type ui or jet engine from crocker block and they just simply allow you to easily and visually create a custom post type so you can use it for things like it could be books it could be a movie collection it could be a business listing website could be a real estate website every single property on a real estate website is all put inside a property custom post type but it still works in exactly the same way as a normal wordpress post or page does it's just different terminology for the same thing and a simple way to allow you to create your own variations upon that basic theme right and i think that's something you know you bring up a good point that a lot of the tools we already use whether you realize it or not like woocommerce for example just because just about everybody has at least installed woocommerce it's basically just a system of a custom post type so you're already using probably some pre-built ones whether you realized it or not i think the idea here is probably talk about kind of how you can create those on your own for specific things so you mentioned a few of the tools and i do want to go into that here in a few um but so so let's talk about some examples of why you would set up a what you would set up a custom post type for rather than just going in and creating a bunch of one-off pages like what would be uh the purpose and maybe some examples of setting up a custom post type the problem if you just use the basic tools like you say the posts and the pages that are part of wordpress is that when your site starts to grow and let's just take a real estate sort of website as an example when that starts to grow it very quickly becomes very unwieldy when you want to expand you want to add in your sort of new types of properties and those kinds of things so it makes a lot more sense to have its own dedicated section so you know you can create your own custom post types and add your own custom posts and you can organize those in whatever fashion you want and then let's just keep that analogy going when you then need to have the agents that are going to sell the properties you don't want them lumped into the same location as the properties because then it just really becomes complex and confusing so it makes more sense to separate those out into their own component parts so you have you know your agents they could be covering a certain area and then you can put that into a taxonomy so for example you know your categories your tags whatever kind of taxonomy you want to create to group those agents together and the same goes for the properties you know you're going to have condos you're going to have apartments you're going to have houses you know all different kinds of things so it doesn't make any sense to combine all of those into one big sort of lump it makes more sense to separate those out into various different parts and that's where the benefit of things like custom post types and you know creating custom taxonomies really comes in it just allows you to organize things in a much simpler fashion and expand those various different components as and when you need to with just the things you need them to include so it's just a simpler way of working more than anything yeah and i think go ahead i was gonna say and it makes uh like doing so like makes it much easier on the user's end as well as yours so like you know if you're building a a website that has like all of these listings it's easier to uh to search for oh i only want condos or i only want to uh to look at these types of listings it allows for that much much easier as well exactly yeah and when you look at i mean if you're doing something like real estate you know or anything that has potentially you know hundreds if not thousands of items inside the listings you want to make the searching and the filtering as simple as possible for yourself when you build that facility but also for the end user you don't want them to have to sort of you know clamor through things that are completely unrelated to what they're looking for so it's more of an organizational kind of tool than a necessity it just makes your life unlike you say the end users lives considerably easier by organizing things in a much more logical straightforward and expandable fashion you know you are going to come across situations where you set something up now and if you're working with clients you know in six months 12 months 18 months they could come back and say well i really want to have this now as well well if you've got to kind of retrofit that into something that is kind of cobbled together it really makes it very complex to do that in a structured logical fashion so again you know when you can create custom post types you can create custom meta fields and associate those with your post types i don't wanna make the field is it's like the title the price those kinds of things it just makes it easier than when you want to add in basically like another module that's another custom post type with its own meta fields and its own kind of relationships that's just so much easier moving forward than like you say trying to lump everything into one overarching kind of system which is you know what wordpress is without using something like custom post types right so so for me kind of the the rule of thumb when i'm looking at a you know especially a client project is am i going to have several pages that are going to have the same type of content on each page so like when we use your property listing thing they're all going to have a photo of the property and an address and a price and all these things right so that's kind of the first thing i look at but even like practical um you know things i use use for myself so in my agency's website i have a custom post type set up for my portfolio because basically every one of those uh projects inside my portfolio are going to have the same type of information so within that custom post type um you know with with the default wordpress editor you're getting the the title field and then the content area and then categories and that's basically all the the spots you have now if you're using a page builder obviously you go into a whole separate area and create your content however you want but really all that's just fitting inside that content field inside your post so for like my portfolio for example i've set up the custom post type that has the name of the project the url to where people can go visit it live the screenshots of it a testimonial from the customer whatever fields are going to be repeated on each one of those posts so it really makes it easy for the back end when you're when you're wanting to create and post content to your website when you already have this template that's set up it's basically like filling in a form on the back end to create the page so a lot of times that's what i'll explain to my customers is uh really we're going to set up a system that if you can fill in a form you can publish a new page to your website um and i think some of us especially you know i'm in this category too i didn't start working with wordpress until 2017. so uh there wasn't a time i was using wordpress before i was using a page builder so i think i think there's some kind of line of demarcation there where people who came in after page builders were you know all the rage uh we didn't see like the need for that that kind of system because you could build things so freely so i think there is uh is some kind of um you know some kind of divide there you know where people either get it or don't so you know i mentioned in here uh custom fields so within your custom post types the the big benefit inside of there is you can create all the fields you want so tell us a little bit about what fields are and what role they play inside the custom post type well basically when you start out with taking a look at a post order page with wordpress without any kind of custom post type whether you're working with a page or a post or with media to a certain extent or woocommerce they've all got similar feels you've got your title you've got your description field you know you've got your slug and things like that they're basic fields and when you create a custom post type you can assign those and have those included as part of it so your featured image title and so on however when you want to move beyond that which as kyle's already said with a portfolio where you want to put in testimonials links maybe the software you used and so on yes you could use a page builder to do that but the problem with that comes down to the fact that it gets very time consuming to repeat the same thing and just edit each one of those different areas whereas if all you have to do is type up what you want click to insert the image or the gallery of images in a nice simple straightforward form layout that you're used to working with you know could be a front-end setup it could be a back-end setup depending if it's for yourself or your client well you can expand all those very easily by tying in a tool like advanced custom fields into your custom post types and that just allows you to bolt on extra fields of various different types so text fields you know wysiwyg field so if you want the full text editor experience with media uploads you can do that you know numeric fields so whatever you kind of want to do you can create custom fields and associate that either with your custom post type or you can tag those on to existing post types so the normal wordpress pages for example in posts you can still add it to that and there's lots of flexibility i think this is the thing that probably scares people when they see what you can kind of do with tools like you know custom post type ui for creating your custom post types and then a tool like advanced custom fields or pods to create you know your your metaphors that you want to associate with it there's all these terminologies flying around there's all these different types of fields and how do you associate it and what's the difference between this field and that field and it really does become incredibly confusing until you just kind of it clicks you have a switch in your head it just goes ah so that's what a taxonomy is all that's what a meta field is or that's what a custom post type is when that switch is flipped it starts to just make a lot more sense but prior to that it's incredibly confusing because the terminology is so vast and to take on something else we've just been talking about where you mentioned templates one of the other really powerful things if you're using something like custom post types and meta fields with a tool like elementor or beaver builder or divi is that you can then create templates for your custom post types so then you just simply fill up the details for your new project your new property whatever and the template's already been created so you're just filling in the blanks and then the page builder takes over the design aspect so all those different templates for the various different reasons tie beautifully in with your custom post types and your advanced custom fields or custom meta feels kind of thing so combining those tools together which again like i say is kind of daunting for people that are not used to this kind of thing once you you see how powerful that combination actually is you'll start to realize that wordpress just becomes a vehicle for your imagination you can create so much more than just being stuck inside wordpress and relying upon a plug-in to do a business directory a plug-in to do something else a plug-in to do something else you have a tool kit that just simply allows you to create almost anything you want with just using the core skills that you build up you know working with these kinds of tools whichever sort of variation you decide to pick up on yeah and you saying that once it clicks thing that's the thing that i think is so hard for people there's just this point before you completely understand and that that completely that just clicks that's just what it is it's at a certain point you you get the idea and the premise and the purpose and and it really changes everything and like you said the the biggest benefit for me especially somebody that uses elementor but like you said divi beaver builder a page builder is creating that one template to be able to to edit everything so for somebody that hasn't done this before basically you can create a page in your page builder and instead of typing in the content or selecting the image you want you just connect it to those fields that you set up the custom fields you set up so then it will dynamically pull in that content each new post you set up so for an example and why this is really important for scalability of a website i have a client here locally that has a a live performance theater and they do a few shows a week and so they've been my client for a little over two years now a few shows a week for a little over two years it's a lot of shows that that site got big really really quick and i had originally um you know set this up probably not properly not too long after i started i got it all into a custom post type and got it set up the way i wanted and there's been many times where they said hey on all the show posts we need to change such and such right uh the color of the background or this new uh they added you can bring your own beer right so they wanted byob on all the show posts now if i had a couple hundred show listings that were all individual posts or pages i would have to open all those up in my page builder and change everything out one at a time for all those but with the template uh i just opened the template changed out what i needed to in that static content area uh and press save and it automatically applies to all those posts so for me the the scalability and being able to change things like that is i mean that's that's a huge game changer when you're talking about growing a website but to take that one step further imagine if they come along and said well we've got a hundred events now planned for the next year in this particular category but we want to change the name of that category imagine having to do that manually whereas now using something like you know advanced custom fields or custom post types you can create that taxonomy that is the category for your event and then you can simply go in just change the title and all of those hundred events are changed straight away you know it's that kind of combination of using dynamic data which is what advanced custom fields and pods and that kind of creates alongside the templates that you you build as part of you know tool like elementor and then just having that combination those two together when you want to make a global change it now becomes something that takes you seconds instead of potentially hours and try to tell the client it's going to take hours to just basically change one word to another yeah and you're going to build them for several hours and they're going to be like well i simply wanted a word change why is that going to cost me x amount of money you know what i mean so it's like it doesn't only make your clients life easier it makes your relationship with that client a little bit smoother because they don't feel like they're getting ripped off for something that should be a really simple change in their head but for you you know the technical side of it is 50 different templates or 100 different pages to edit that starts to become you know totally unrealistic and can cause problems so it's like it's how you plan these things and once you start to see the benefits of using them all in conjunction together it can make a massive difference to you know your client relationships your profitability just the way that you run your business it just makes it so much easier yeah and all this kind of uh ties into tyler's question which was why uh why use acf versus cloning a page uh or uh just an element or template because of that exact reason like you don't have to go into each one of those particular pages make the change save it out go to the next one make the same change it's just it's widespread you hit you hit it once and it's done yeah and that's not to say that custom post types are to completely replace pages for example if you have a completely unique bespoke page that's not going to be relatable to any other page on your website then there's no real reason to create a custom post type especially if you're using a page builder you could just do that as a one-off but if you're if you have so so let's just talk about some examples things we've used custom post types before i know matt's got some so like i said i've done a couple websites where people have concerts or live performances or doing one right now for a band that wants to list out all their shows business directories so i put together a directory for my little neighborhood uh all the people who live in our neighborhood and own a business so i put a directory together uh just used a simple a really really simple custom post type for that that listed out the business name and address and phone number and a description and a photo or whatever like i said my portfolio over on docket wp's website we created a custom post type for all the pre-built lists that are included with the software so every time we add a new list i just go in there and fill it in and it's it's ready to go matt you've done some cool ones with um your golf courses haven't you yeah pretty much any uh any of the course tours um so like each it's a dedicated page to each hole so there's 18 of those and they all contain pretty much the same the same information it just varies a little bit depending on the the yardage of the hole like you know what uh what different like tips or pro tips they might want to add for each individual one so each one of those sections is tied to a post or a custom field um and that way right like you've got one layout that's not going to change between these 18 these 18 pages but it just it funnels all that information in yeah just the content changes exactly and if they did want to change the layout or the look of those pages i wouldn't have to do it 18 times it's just the once i change that that template and everything like it it holds everything there so whatever changes you make are just boom there's there's all of them um similarly any clients that have uh like a lot of different services that they provide um i've got a couple of like veterinarian type websites and they offer you know probably around like 20 25 different services but again all of those pages the layout's the same it's just the content the uh the information is different so those are again actually before i i really got comfortable with uh with post types or custom fields um they i had built one one particular uh veterinarian website that had somewhere around like 20 different pages if not more and each one was a separate page and i went in on my own time you know i didn't charge them because it was my mistake but i changed it over eventually so that it was all custom post types so that the next time they uh they requested changes or whatever it might be it would be easier on me like you were saying paul where one of those like oh we want to change the the sidebar to display this stuff as well it's not a headache it's not like you know you get that email and you're like oh no this is so much work it completely takes that away so you get the email and you're like okay cool it's gonna be five minutes you're gonna get back to your customer and they're gonna email you back and say how do you do this so quick you know so it's it's yeah that's pretty much the primary uh primary two that i use what about you paul some examples yeah before i jump to examples let me just sort of answer the original kind of question if you think of it like this if you go back to elementor or you looked at elementor free let's just say you had a site that had 20 of the same pages you'd have to create 20 pages in your home page and your contact page and so on and then when you want to make a change like we've already mentioned you have to change all 20 pages but when they brought templates into elementor it was a game changer because now you can start to pull in information from various different parts and create one template and then you'd have you know a hundred pages using that one template well take that a step further and think well if you had a site that had a thousand listings for businesses you know you'd only have to have one template for those businesses one form to input the information for those businesses a home page and a contact maybe so four or five pages but ultimately you could have thousands of pages that the people would see but the reality is you've only got a couple of pages being built and the data has just been input from the back end in a very simple form structure so it's not something to replace the way that you work with a tool like elementor it's another way to enhance your process to streamline the process of creating big sites that all have replicable data it's all using different data for an exactly the same structure and then pulled into a template to be output in the same way the only thing that changes is the actual data that's dynamically being pulled from the record or the page or the post or the custom post type that's being displayed at any one time so to use that um and to give some examples i've built sites for clients where i live in the uk it's a very touristy kind of location close to me and i work with this sort of tourist association in that area that deals with um sort of accommodations all different kinds of accommodation from bed and breakfast through to hotels through to cottages you know all those kinds of things so that's a good example of how you use it they've got hundreds of different businesses that pay them to list on there and then they can just simply go in and manage that content without any knowledge of wordpress they just simply know okay there's these 10 fields i've got to fill in with the relevant data that's been supplied on a form that i've created for them that they can give to the client the businesses and then they just transfer that written data into the form hit submit and there you go there's a new business added they want to take one off they can just delete it from the record no touching templates no touching design files only need to go in and access that one thing that they need and they can just add as many businesses as they want um another example is there's an arts festival that runs every year in the same town as where most of these businesses are based and they wanted the website to do very similar kind of thing and some of what kyle was mentioning with the sort of like the different gigs and things like that they obviously had various different things different venues so there's a custom post type there you've then got the various different artists there's a custom post type there and then you've got the actual exhibitions or the event that they're doing so when that artist is doing 10 different events in that particular art festival they can link or i can link that through to the artist and then they can update the artist's bio and all 10 events will have the artists bio and if they want to make a change to it they just log in edit the artist bio in the back end of wordpress in one location and then all 10 events will be updated immediately so it just kind of flows through and this is this is the thing that when that switch kind of clicks should we say you stop thinking of pages you stop thinking of things like that and you start to think of how can i split this information into simple chunks and how can i use a tool like you know acf like you know jet engine those kinds of tools how can i use those to make this a sort of a reality in the simplest cleanest way for me now and also moving forward for the client yeah i think you're you're absolutely right on that and i think there's a lot of good examples i i almost get to the point now where when i'm starting a new project for a customer i'm i'm starting with that mindset of okay what things in here can i template out and i think the one the one uh line i've written down here while we did this a good way i think of explaining it that i don't know why didn't occur to me before but basically a good rule of thumb is if the layout or structure of the page or post or the the page on the website is going to be the same across multiple ones but the content is different there you go that's when a a custom post type definitely makes sense so right there related with custom post types and usually within the same tools which we are going to have to get to tools we're getting lots of questions about that but is taxonomies and i know that's been brought up a couple times so why don't we talk a little bit about what is a a taxonomy well taxonomy was a term that kind of just befuddled me for ages and it's like why are you using the term taxonomy it doesn't make any real sense to me but forget the term taxonomy just know that it exists and all it really means is a way of grouping your custom data together so let's use woocommerce as a great example you have products the product is your custom post type and inside there you're going to have things like could be shoes it could be hats it could be gloves it could be t-shirts each one of those is a taxonomy it's a way of grouping your products into a logical grouping the beauty of taxonomies is the fact that one product can be in multiple different taxonomies so you could have for example taking that clothing side of things clothing would be an overarching taxonomy and inside that taxonomy you'd have various different sections again gloves hats t-shirts you know those kinds of things so it's just logical ways of grouping and they can either be single levels or they can be what's called hierarchical which sounds really complicated and all it really means is parent and child in other words clothing is the parent and inside there you have t-shirts hats jumpers all those kind of things and their child and they can go down multiple different levels if you want that's basically one form of taxonomy the second one then as we're kind of used to with terminology that's used inside wordpress are tags so tags is another form of taxonomy and it works in exactly the same way so using the same analogy you could have tags for example the type of material so it could be wool it could be polyester it could be various different kinds of things so then you can have lots of ways of grouping your information grouping your custom post types your products whatever you're kind of creating together into just logical little clusters that have some kind of sense to them that's all a taxonomy really is ways of grouping your custom data into logical chunks so that's that's what i would suggest you kind of think of when you start to hear the terminology taxonomies being thrown around yeah and and so you're already using the built-in taxonomies that come with wordpress if you're posting a blog post because it has the little section for picking a category which is the default taxonomy setup and a a section to put in a tag so creating custom taxonomies just allows you to create instead of just using the default category because category might not make sense like you said you can create one for the type of clothing or whatever it may be so uh you know if we talked about my portfolio example you could have you know the services you did so did you do seo did you do copywriting did you just do design or did you do design and development so you could create a taxonomy that kind of lists your services you rendered for that right so somebody from a front-end application if somebody's browsing the site they you could have those taxonomies linked and you could sort all those posts and just see everything where i did the design work and then boom it's just going to filter in and show all the ones that we've clicked that taxonomy in there so that's definitely a good way of thinking about it for sure so let's let's move on and talk a little bit about tools so there's a lot of different ways to do this uh i think you have some experience and some ones that i've never touched before so so let's run through some of the different tools i guess for creating uh creating custom post types some of those uh will just do that also as well creating custom fields because you kind of want to do post types and fields you need you really need both to get to get everything out of it yeah i mean there are lots of different tools out there some of them are free some of them will cost you money but what i would say is if you are new to this kind of thing and you just look in to learn there's a couple of resources that i would say are worth checking out because once you kind of understand how one tool works and the terminology that's around it moving to something else is just learning the quirks so i guess what you could sort of say is if you learn to drive in for the american lens a stick shift car and then you go to an automatic you don't really re-learn how to drive you just modify what you used to to take into consideration the slightly different controls so there's no longer a stick shift you know you're not changing gears it's automatically done for you and the same kind of thing goes when it comes to working with tools like advanced custom fields or acf like working with tools like jet engine or pods you know they're all very similar in what they do they might have slightly different terminology they might have slightly different ways in which you do the same thing but they're all doing the same thing they're either creating custom post types or they're creating and adding meta fields in so what i would suggest is if you're new to this and you really do want to learn to get an understanding before you invest any kind of money i would say take a look at advanced custom fields because the normal version is free and it has pretty ninety percent of the pro version tools and more than enough to do probably most jobs you'd ever need and then you've got a tool like cpt ui which is just custom post type ui that's a free plug-in the two of those combined together you've got enough to get you started if you use elementor and you want to go a little bit deeper elementor pro is a great way then to easily grab that data through the dynamic tags you know if you want to create your own custom loops and what a loop is is basically if you look at a blog a wordpress blog each post is a loop item so when you're looking at you know a series of say six blog items each one there's a loop item and then you can use tools like elementor custom skin which again is totally free and you can create your own custom loop items and then you can design the loop in a way that you want and pull in custom data so this all might sound quite complicated and i can totally understand that but what i would suggest is if kyle doesn't mind me sort of saying this you are new to this kind of thing pretty earlier this year i created beginner's guides to acf pods and jet engine three of the sort of key tools that i would use to do this kind of thing they take you from knowing nothing at all about these tools to through various different um video tutorials up to the point where you then have a good understanding you could probably pick which you think is the right tool for you and you could start then advancing and learning more advanced kind of techniques but there are lots of tools so let's say to start off with i would say either choose pods or acf and cpt ui both of which are completely free but then you also have things like uh jet engine which is part of croco block suite so if you've never heard of croco block it's basically a suite of plugins that give you a huge array of different control over what you can do with elementor and to a certain extent gutenberg and they have part of that is to do with dynamic content jet engine being the main part of it and again that allows you to create custom post types allows you to create custom meta fields a whole range of extra things as well but it's cool it allows you to do those kinds of things there are other ones out there but if i'm honest they're either tools that i've never looked at in any kind of real depth because they're expensive and most people don't want to pay a huge amount of money for something that they're learning about you know that's just a really difficult way to sort of sell to people use this tool this is going to cost you 200 for this and another 150 for that and i don't you don't know anything about how to use these tools it's not gonna fly so i would say take a look if you want to add those tutorials hopefully kyle can sort of drop some information in the description to this or something later on for you if anyone's interested or hit me up whichever but they'll get you up to speed with the core tools and how you can at least get started and find out if this is the kind of road you want to continue down and seeing what kinds of tools there are available to you to be able to start building your own dynamic based websites yeah and so i i agree with everything you said there so uh the other one that i think we see come up the most that that wasn't in that list is tool set tool set is really really powerful but i think tool sets uh even more complicated than the ones we already talked about so i really if if this is something you're just starting out with i would probably shy away from tool set because it's just a lot more complicated so usually the advice i give people is if you're brand new to this and you just want to dip your toe in the water pods is a really good place to start because it handles creating custom post types creating custom fields and creating custom taxonomies all in one package pods is completely free there's not even a pro version you could go buy if you wanted to for a long time it was being supported financially through matt mullenwig and i believe that's no longer happening so their their funding is is through donations and things like that i think the knock on pods is that it's fairly slow to get developed uh and for things to change but honestly uh it's gonna do 90 of the things we've already talked about in this call today it will handle all those things for you and it has great integrations with both beaver builder and elementor i don't know about divi because i've never opened divi my personal preference is using cpt ui like custom post type ui it's a free plugin that will handle all creating your custom post types uh and then using acf or advanced custom fields to create all the fields within those post types the the disadvantage there is you have to have two plug-ins to really accomplish that they they wouldn't do you much good on their own one without the other but those two are really really powerful really easy to use and the free version of advanced custom fields like you said does about 90 of everything uh i have the pro version because i want that extra 10 but you can really uh you can really get everything done with that and then like i said there's a lot of people that swear on uh on toolset but i i found it too complicated for me i think i uh i would say i'm i'm like uh i can dominate the easy level of of custom fields like if it was a video game and we put it on easy mode like i can dominate there but i don't do super advanced stuff with it yet so uh i wouldn't i wouldn't speak to that well and then uh the jet engine stuff is just something i've never opened so i really can't speak to that one what what are you using currently matt um i'm using the uh the same uh like two that you are uh like just you know advanced custom fields and uh and ui but um yeah we we are starting to get a couple of questions in here regardless a lot of relationship stuff um so like you know basically like what's the uh what's the best way to uh to set up relationships between different cpts that that's a difficult one and not one that's very easy to answer it's pretty open-ended yeah um i created videos on building relationships and a couple of different tools for doing it because the difficult part is not so much building the relationship it's how you output that relationship if you're using a tool like elementor pro by default elementor pro won't work with relationships you have to use third-party plugins to be able to do anything with it so i kind of think what is anywhere elementor pro is one that allows you to work with relationships there's there's one by goose studios i've taken a look at i haven't tried it that's really focused on building relationships and setting those up you can use jet engine with advanced custom fields and use it to create relationships in a visual fashion so there's lots of different tools i would say if you're looking to sort of see how relationships work how to set them up and how to work with them i don't think this is the best platform for doing it we have a live chat i would highly recommend just taking a look at my youtube channel the website whichever one you want i'm doing a search relationships because i've already created i think it's these two or three maybe a couple more videos that's dedicated to how you work with relationships and i think that's going to give you more value than me just trying to explain it you know just to a screen kind of thing like this without seeing what i'm doing and how you'd set things up because the difficult or the most complex part of working relationships is creating that relationship to start off with whether it's going to be a one-to-one a one-to-many or a many-to-many relationship and where you have to really sit down and think how do i need to use my data to link these together and what way do i need to work with it from that point on so it takes a little bit of time to sit down and actually structure the overall format of your content and then take a look at link in this relationship and then the sort of like the technical aspect of output in that relational data but it's not as complicated as you may first think but it just takes a little bit of forethought yeah i will uh i'll put links to everything i can in the description but if you literally go to paul's youtube channel i'm sorry because now you're going to be there for the next like six weeks just binge watching youtube videos but there's lots of good information there i will say sometimes when you when you think you need some kind of relationship sometimes taxonomies can be that nice bridge where you don't have to do all that right so you can create a custom taxonomy and apply it to multiple post types right uh so if you had a post type for shoes and a post type for shirts uh a taxonomy for colors right that's kind of a way to to bridge a relationship where you could still see all the uh things that are green right and that might be shoes and it might be shirts or whatever examples i used so there's some ways you can think about that where you really don't have to go to a really long extent to accomplish what you need to accomplish yeah this is where i think it comes back to sitting down and actually structuring your data before you start creating anything you know you wouldn't start writing a novel just by sitting you know by by opening up and starting to write the entire thing in the beginning yeah yeah you put a skeleton together of what you're trying to achieve you know an outline structure of what it is the storyline is and the same kind of thing goes for your database if you just literally jump in there and start trying to create database tables and thinking oh this will work with that and that will work with that you're going to find that halfway through the development cycle unless you're really really lucky you're going to come across something you hadn't planned because you hadn't planned at all and it's going to be well all the work i've done to this point is now useless to be because it isn't going to work the way i need it to because the data has to do this so this is why i always suggest when you're working with more complicated projects that require relationships sit down and plan out what it is you need to do think it through prototyping on a piece of paper or use you know something like um one of the prototyping tools the design tools you can use with adobe and all those kind of sketch and all that kind of thing and you can kind of build your relationships between the different parts then and you can visually see how they need to interact with each other and once you've kind of fleshed all that out then you can start just sort of doing the non-designed technical side of things to make sure that it works and you don't come across problems and then you'll start adding in the pretty things you know that's the way i would look at it planning is important for sure yeah well you can't build a good house if you don't build good foundations right absolutely uh we've had a couple people asking about uh a front in form submission for custom post types so they were mentioning a tool here that i'm guessing had a black friday deal meta box i'm not familiar with it asking if it had a a front-end submission but let's just talk about kind of front-end submission uh in general so uh but typically we're in the back end of wordpress and we're going to be putting in the information inside the custom post type back there uh but a lot of these do have uh things built in or or third party form tools where you can actually uh fill in all the content that goes in that custom post type from the front end so why don't you tell us a little bit about that yeah i mean one of the the sort of the most popular two of the most popular tutorials that i've created over the last 20 12 months have been front end submission because if you've got a client let's just use that analogy we had back to the beginning which is a real estate site if you build that for a client you don't necessarily want to give them access to the dashboard of wordpress it's much better to have a nice-looking front-end that they can log in they can see the content they've put in there you know as opposed to seeing every single thing and then they can manage things in a much nicer way and this is where front-end form plug-ins like acf front enforce pro i think wp user front-end forms pro some long-winded thing like that they give you access to simpler ways of doing this without having to go in and hack the code if you're using this with a tool like elementor pro where you can template a lot of this out you can create a really great looking front-end form that is seamlessly integrated with the back-end information so that you kind of keep people out of that site thinks they can't get stuck in and make any problems and you're going to lock the dashboard down you know so they only have access to certain things you can create something that's a lot nicer and like say those those particular plugins probably my preference is acf frontend forms pro and the free version because that does a ton of things more than probably what most of us would need for most typical websites that you want to keep clients out they just make the whole process super super simple and to give you a little example the first one i created which was probably about a year or so ago i got contacted by um the developers over at elementor and asked me could they have access to that dashboard that i created in the back end of the site because they wanted to see how i'd done it because they liked it they want to see so how have you gone about building all that kind of thing so i don't know what they've done with it so you never know maybe in the future we'll have that kind of facility built into elementor have you gotten your checks for that yet are they in the mail or i would i wish it's in the post apparently um so yeah there's tools out there that make this really super easy and again if you look on on the the um the youtube channel just do front-end forms there's probably about five or six covering things like you know woocommerce and an acf and jet engine you know most of those kind of key tools i've created dedicated videos that will show you how to do all that including free downloads of the template that's been used for that dashboard which you could just then use as the basis of your own dashboards if you want to yeah that exact video actually i had a client of mine um they're planning on maybe in like three four months to uh to start some sort of like um like area of their website that's just for their their own staff and to hold like you know notes and and meeting notes and stuff like that and that exact video of yours is the uh the one that uh i'm in the process of doing exactly that so i can i highly recommend those videos thank you very much shout out to zach pyle in the group here he's uh answering lots of questions in the uh the comments here so i appreciate it buddy uh let's see do we did you see uh any more questions here that you want to make sure we covered matt i was trying to scroll through here see it looks like a lot of the questions we've already answered relationships tom asks hey paul and gang can cpts be used for simple ecom listings um you probably could do um it's how you then integrate that with some form of payment would be the more complicated side of things right and it's whether you really wanted to go down creating something from scratch that's kind of already been done by using tools that are already like you know woocommerce might be a little bit overkill but if it's digital downloads for example you look at it selling then you've got like easy digital downloads sometimes it's better not to reinvent the wheel if you don't need to uh let's say the only thing i think would be complicated there would be to link it through to how you're going to be able to build people and then build the billing process and all those kinds of things so you probably could do it well actually you could do it there's no real reason why you couldn't it's whether you could do it without having a solid understanding of how acf works and how you combine that with a templating system and a payment gateway and apis and all those kinds of things so it's like absolutely worth the squeeze there exactly yeah it's a case of you probably could but would you really want to right yeah i think what you'd probably find is you're going to be opening some cans of worms that you didn't expect uh so like the status of an order or order refunds or all these things are just already built into a system like woocommerce for better or worse it's already got all of those things built in that you're going to eventually have to consider with a custom post type so i think there's you know i i wouldn't say there's a good blanket answer on should i use a pre-built tool or should i just build my own for example some of the other day asked uh they were looking for a a pre-built system for doing like a business directory and i'm like man for me i'm just building a custom post type for that because then i can put in just the fields i need specific to this project i don't have to reinvent anything it's going to take me literally 10 minutes to create the plus custom post type and fields so for me on a on a project like that i would probably go custom post type route um and just create it myself but when you start talking about should i do this for my own like e-commerce solution that's where i would back off and say yeah probably just go with something that's already built right because there's eventually going to be something like unless you do e-commerce and that's like that's what you live and breathe like those shipping uh like time frames and all like all of the stuff that it handles like you're you're going to forget one of those things yeah and if you're doing that for a client the last thing you want is one of the vital things that they need to be able to complete that transaction or complete the shipping or whatever just fundamentally doesn't work and that's a whole sort of kind of whoop should we say yep so uh before we wrap this up i do want to ask because i think uh us and most of the people listening to this are building websites for clients so do you bother explaining any of uh you needing to build out these kinds of systems to clients or do you just uh just produce the website they want that's a good question simple answer the latter i i don't think i don't think most clients care what you use to to create the solution to what they're looking for and i think that i did a video on this ages and ages ago a little talking head kind of thing because so many people are going to call should i tell my client i use elementor should i tell them that i use your wordpress all these kinds of things and my answer to that whole question is the client generally doesn't care all they want is they've got a problem they want to sell online they've got a restaurant they want to have online booking you know whatever it is they just have a problem and they want someone like you to provide a solution the tools you use are completely irrelevant for 99.9 of cases so generally if a client asked you know why are you charging me this much money for creating something that i turn around and probably say well the reason being is because i've got to custom design these particular features for you don't need to go into detail as to what i'm using in the same way that if you took your car to a mechanic and they say well there's 10 things need to be done you're not going to ask them what tools they're going to use to change the wheel change the tire or change the clutch you know you're okay you just want to pick your car up in a week's time hand the money over begrudgingly and drive away and the car just feels good and i would say the same thing kind of goes for most clients they just want you to provide a solution to the problem and pay you the money and know that there should be anything wrong afterwards you know so no basically yeah so i i totally agree with you and the the car mechanic is a good analogy because yeah i wouldn't i don't really care what they're going to use i will say i i've kind of structured my pricing based upon what what i'm going to have to build out right and so uh building out a custom post type versus not having to do that does require some additional work uh it's not always a ton but um so so it does change how i price things sometimes although um you know when you're talking about my show listings you know that example i'm actually saving a ton of time by creating a custom post type than i would be to create all those as pages so uh sometimes that's actually just more you know financially responsible to do it that way but i do use it as a selling point sometimes for clients on um here recently i did a website for a city of small little city and they wanted to have like a listing of all the businesses there and i said well what i'll do is just create a system that makes it really easy for you to go in and create those listings edit those listings and delete those listings and basically what i explained to them was a custom post type uh in layman's terms just say you know if you could fill out a form and press save then you can handle updating the website and creating a new listing and it's going to look beautiful just like all the others so i will kind of use it as a sales tool um sometimes that makes it helpful yeah i think that's the thing is that you are using it as part of your sales pitch to say well look this is going to be specific for you i'm going to build what you were looking for you know you're not telling the tools and i think the slight flip side of that is if you were going to build that for a client if they come to you and you didn't know anything about custom post types and all those kinds of things you'd have to go and find a plug-in or plug-ins that would do what you needed to do that would fit into what they wanted and that can be time-consuming because you've got to check out to make sure it does what you want to do probably buy it to test it to make sure it can do what you want it to do for the client and then there's a potential for the ongoing license the learning how to integrate it will it integrate into your design process and all those kind of unknowns you know even if just for the first time and maybe after that it's easier but when you know about tools like advanced customer feels you stop thinking about what can i find what have i got in the past that's allowed me to do this or can i can i get back to you in a week's time so i can come back with a proposal because i just need to do some some leg work to find out if it's viable you just think okay that's cool yeah i could use a custom post type so realistically is probably saving you development time research time quotation time and just knowing that you can do what they need to do because you've already done it with the tools that you are really used to so the client basically comes away with probably a better deal long term and so do you because you spend a lot less time doing your research to just you know sort of quote on the project right yeah and the other thing uh one thing that i use it for is um i had this one client that wanted a a directory of sorts where they would list out i mean literally hundreds of different uh local activities for uh for like kids of all ages like you know and all that where because it was built with custom post types the uh the client was able to go in add them you know however often they wanted um they didn't really have the budget necessarily for me to sit there and and perform data entry for all of these different listings so one thing that i was able to do was to explain to him like i can set up the first like three to five i'll show you i'll record a tutorial video on how to go in add your properties but this is going to significantly reduce the price to the point where they were like okay we'll take this or we'll hire you on i built the site i got that that money i got a care plan out of it so that there's it's got a tail as well and now the client goes in and basically does all of the uh the redundant data entry where they don't need to pay me to do that but also it makes anymore easy for them exactly yeah it's kind of win-win for everybody yeah they just you know you you were not spending time doing something that let's be honest about it you probably have an hourly rate that you work on and if someone comes to you and says okay i need you to put in 100 different businesses you're going to think well that's going to take me 30 hours for example and i'm going to charge you 75 an hour they're going to look at you and go well i could do that myself but the reality is your time is worth that amount of money and if you're doing donkey work as it were or you're doing sort of design work which is more skilled that doesn't make any difference to you you can't just drop your price based upon the fact that it's more expensive per hour for them to do that than that do you know what i mean so i think you know the client wins because they don't have to have anything that's complicated they're just filling out a form as simple as that you know it it makes the whole process easier and wordpress can be quite daunting for the uninitiated when they see how many options are in there it just gets confusing for some people i think that's where a tool like acf you know any kind of dynamic thing especially with a front end dashboard where you can simplify it again you know you just make the whole process easier so the time you invest in it can often save you a lot more time and get you a client that wouldn't be able to afford you to do those things that they can do themselves exactly absolutely all right two things and then we'll wrap this up i know we're pressed here against time and there's many of us wanting to get to dave foy's lovely webinar that starts in like four minutes so i think we all want to do that all right two things and i'll be quick uh number one um james is curious about matt's wooden structure scroll to the beginning of this and he'll tell you a little bit about it and he's going to hopefully post some pictures of it next week but i wanted to finish on this note uh james uh commented in here that paul's dashboard video helped him raise a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for their local children's hospital so that is pretty damn awesome oh yeah that's amazing that's really amazing to hear so that's awesome that's that's uh that's made my day who knew just making a few little youtube videos could do something like that you hope to contribute to a 150 000 to help children yeah that's absolutely fantastic so well done whatever you did whatever you took away from that video well done and uh carry on doing what you're doing no doubt well i really appreciate you jumping on here with us paul it's been really good to connect with you on here uh like we mentioned several times throughout this we're gonna drop a bunch of links if you go search wp tuts on uh youtube you'll find tons of pause videos in fact just search elementor and you'll find tons of paul's videos uh there's all kinds of ways to find them on there but we'll add plenty of links on here and i i really do appreciate you coming here and talking to us about all of this all right guys well if this group or show helps you in any way the best way to help us is to like and subscribe to our channel share our content and use our affiliate links it's all free it takes little time and it greatly helps support the show we will catch you all on the next one [Music] bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: The Admin Bar

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Id: xXjxcXg4Ai4

Length: 58min 57sec (3537 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020