Hello everybody! It’s been a long, long, long time since I’ve posted on our blog. Part of the reason is I’ve been so busy working on cool projects and on the Pods GitHub that I haven’t really had the time to keep up this blog. My wife and I also recently welcomed our second daughter into the world and have been enjoying the corresponding lack of sleep 🙂

Truth is, most days I usually just have a few spare seconds. I’ll tweet when I can on the @podsframework Twitter account and that ends up syncing over to the Pods Framework page on Facebook. We even have a @podsframework on App.net but that’s not active or synced yet.

New Site

Why have I been so busy? One of the reasons is this brand spanking new site you’re on right now, launched on July 4th, 2013. It’s been many months in the making, and many contributors have helped us out along the way.

• Phil Lewis: He’s all over the Pods world right now, helping on GitHub, our IRC chat, and he’s been working hard on this new site. There is so much we all have to be thankful for in life, but don’t forget to thank him next time you see him!
• Pippin Williamson: An all around nice guy! He helped us get the new site up and going using his own Easy Digital Downloads site as a base. I love his plugin project and look forward to using it in the future with some of my own projects.
• John McAlester: This guy really took one for the team, he painstakingly went through every single function, class, and method in the Pods codebase to help us map our new docs area out. Without his help, you wouldn’t have any awesome docs to browse through!
• Siobhan McKeown: This insanely witty technical writer from across the pond has helped us write our Getting Started guide and a few new tutorials. We hope that her work will make it easier for new users to understand Pods, use it, and reduce support time in general on some of the most common questions. She also helped us plan out our new Docs area’s structure and how it will work. These days, you’ll find her making waves on the new Official WordPress Handbook, so glad she’s now working directly on the WP project more!

Pods 2.4 in the works

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work at fixing bugs and the new site, but we’ve also been planning out Pods 2.4 and how it will work. One of the features we’re digging our feet into the ground on is the new Loop Fields. We’ve spent a great deal of time planning how this new feature will look and work, because this is a big feature. We’re not just hacking it together, because we’re not just your average custom field plugin. There’s a lot of moving parts in Pods because it allows you to create many different types of content to fit almost any developer’s taste. Because of that, more attention has to be paid during the implementation process of the feature so as to not rough anyone’s website or database up! I’m excited to break ground this month on getting this feature into the hands of many alpha/beta testers out there who are eager to use this new feature. I have no doubt our implementation will be highly usable for the large and small projects I’ve come across that have needed it.

What’s next?

There’s a ton of feature requests queued up in our GitHub right now, so really, the future is up to you. Get on our GitHub and start voicing your opinions, let us know what features matter to you, and we’ll use that feedback to help plan Pods 2.5 and beyond.

Many thanks to Automattic who has been helping us throughout the past two years in keeping this project alive and supported. And also to our donors who help make cool features possible and keep new docs / tutorials coming!