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What’s New From Pods- June 2014

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Here at Pods, we’ve been hard at work on Pods 3.0, as well as improving our Pods plugins and working on an exciting new way to document Pods or any WordPress plugin. We’d like to tell you about some updates to our documentation, our add-on plugins, including an exciting new one, and let you know about the latest improvements to Pods itself.

This is the first of what will be regular bi-monthly updates from Pods. We’ll be letting you know about updates to Pods, Pods add-on plugins, tutorials and documentation as well as highlighting cool sites built with Pods and cool tips for using Pods. If you’d like to get these updates in your email you can sign up using the sidebar widget.

Coming Soon: Pods 2.4.1

While we work towards version 3.0 of Pods, we have fixed many issues in version 2.4 and will soon be releasing them as Pods 2.4.1 later this week. These fixes include:

  • Proper output of hidden fields in Pods Forms
  • Reordering fields in PodsUI
  • PodsUI Admin Icon Display
  • New filter: ‘pods_pod_form_success_message’ for changing the message when Pods Forms are successfully submitted.
  • Improvements to Packages component when importing existing fields. Thanks Markus Stefano!
  • New filter: ‘pods_view_alt_view’ for overriding normal Pods Views to be loaded in via AJAX inline from Pods AJAX Views (see below).

The latest version of Pods 2.x is available for download via https://pods.io/latest

Pods Code Library

As part of our efforts to revamp our site and improve our documentation we are developing a system to dynamically build our documentation, and tutorials from the inline documentation in our plugins and from a Code Library repository on GitHub. This means that if you’d like to contribute to or improve our code examples or tutorials, you can by submitting a pull request to the code library repository. While the work is not complete yet, the code library repository is already an excellent resource for example code to help you use Pods.

You can see the code library here and learn about how to contribute here. Adding code examples to the library is a great way to contribute to the code library. All of the code that will be used to generate our documentation and tutorials site is completely open source and covered by the GPL or GPL compatible licenses. We will be publishing extensive documentation on how the system works, so that this work will not only provide a resource to the Pods user community, but to the WordPress community, and larger free software community as a whole.

Pods Plugin Updates

Pods Gravity Forms

Thanks to some awesome work by community member Naomi Bush, The Pods Gravity Forms add-on now has a UI for mapping Gravity Form fields to Pods fields. It is now easier than ever to use Gravity Forms to capture user-submitted data and use it to populate Pods. This plugin is still in development, but is very close to being ready for release. One remaining issue is lack of support for image fields and other type of attachments. If you’d like to help with that, let us know, by replying to that issue.

Map Gravity Form Fields To Pods Fields

Pods AJAX Views

A new, Pods Plugin, currently under development, Pods AJAX Views improves upon the partial page caching capabilities of pods_view, off-loading them into a separate asynchronous AJAX call that allows the rest of the page to be built and sent to the browser, while the view loads. When the AJAX request runs, the view is cached like normal, so subsequent calls to the Pods AJAX View code will produce the exact same result as a default pods_view would. This plugin can decrease page load time and prevent timeout errors on hosts that limit page load time.

Pods Frontier Auto Templates

We will be releasing a minor update to Pods Frontier Auto Templates this week in response to fix some bug, and to support feature requests from users.The new version (1.1.0) fixes an issue with positioning of the included template, as well as an issue when using the magic tag <code>{@post_content}</code> that triggered an error. You can download the latest beta version here.

In addition to the bug fixes, there are new features. In version 1.1.0 you will be able to select to locate your template before, after or in place of post content, and select that position using a drop-down menu. There is now also an option to output the template on ‘the_excerpt’ filter and to choose templates from a drop-down menu and an option to select templates to be used from a drop-down menu. Both of these options, for now, require setting a constant in your wp-config.php, as explained in this tutorial. In the future you will be able to adjust these settings from the Pods settings admin page planned for Pods 3.0.

Support The Pods Foundation

Everything we do at Pods is free–free of charge and licensed under the terms of a free software license. This is possible due to the generous support of those who believe in our mission–making it easy for everyone to use WordPress as a complex content management system. If you’d like to contribute to the Pods Foundation to help support the development and support of the Pods Framework and the growing list of free Pods Plugins, please consider making a donation.