WordPress and Custom Post Types: Together at last
I’ve started building a couple of sites in WordPress 3.0 and while the new Custom Post Types stuff they’ve added in is very nice, it doesn’t quite cover all the bases. Community plugin developers to the rescue!
The challenge I was having was that I wanted to make custom post types that would let me create URLs like so: example.com/videos/ and have that content type show up in the admin navigation automagically. I also wanted to be able to create custom template files in my theme (ex: videos.php) so I could completely customize the layout of the archive and single post views of each of these custom content types. It’s a tall order, no doubt.
All of this is easily accomplished with two plugins though:
The first one let’s you configure your new post types in the admin interface and automatically adds the appropriate interface options to the left sidebar. I was able to easily add a post type for ‘Videos’ in about 30 seconds.
The second one takes care of the templating capabilities I wanted. It let’s me create a couple of template files in my theme directory to customize the archive view (type-videos.php) and the single post view (single-videos.php) for my new content type.
With their combined powers these two plugins make Custom Post Types a breeze!
