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Pods 2.7 Release

Pods 2.7 Release UpdateWe are releasing a major milestone for Pods today, Pods 2.7 includes our new Flexible Relationships feature, Improvements to Date & Time fields, major fixes for our Pods Templates, plus a host of other behind the scenes fixes.

New Requirements

We now require a minimum of WordPress 4.5+, PHP 5.3+, and MySQL 5.5+. Please be sure to update your servers, or contact your host to let them know they are running outdated, potentially insecure software that you are paying for.

We previously supported the following older / outdated versions WP 3.8+, PHP 5.2.4+, MySQL 5.0+

Flexible Relationships (Loop fields but BETTER)

This is probably one of our longest awaited improvements to the Relationships UI within Pods. The power of the new flexible relationships is our new modal window that opens within the existing record for relationship fields. This is modeled after the Media Modal from WordPress and provides full functionality to Add New related records or Edit Existing records all from within the parent record of the relationship. This feature can be combined through our new List View field format for relationship fields which improves the workflow of relationship management from just normal checkboxes and select fields.

Add New Flexible Relationship
See how easy it is to add new records to your existing relationship with the new List View Relationship field

The new flexible relationships feature will automatically be enabled on all of your existing relationships. That means that Add New will be available for users who have the capability to add new items for those related objects. You can easily disable this from the Additional Field Options tab for each relationship field. You can also upgrade your relationships to the new List View from the Additional Field Options tab, under Field Format.

To read more about the decision making and design process behind the scenes for our Flexible Relationships and the DFV fields that they are written on top of, check out our blog post Pods 2.7: What We Did and Why We Did It. This particular release was due to many many long hours and sweat and tears by Phil Lewis and with input and styling and factoring by the whole team.

Date & Time Field Improvements

We have updated our date & time fields to provide a variety of additional input & display formats. These new options for Date Format Type and Time Format Type are available under the Additional Field Options for Date, Time and Date Time fields.

  • Predefined Format: This is the view you’re used to with Pods, where we provide a list of common date & time formats for input. This format defines both input and display formats.
  • WordPress Default: This will allow you to configure the field to use the format defined under WordPress, Settings, General Date & Time Formats. Choosing this field will also show you the format as it’s currently defined.
  • Custom Format: This opens up two additional fields for additional flexibility. You will now have access to a “Format for Display” and a “Format for Input” field. The Format for Display (both on Date & Time) uses the PHP Date & Time Format Strings so you can easily output these fields to display exactly the way you want by default. The Format for Input provides links to the documentation for both our jQuery Datepicker and Timepicker documentation for date/time strings so you can again tailor the input to exactly the style you’d like, or you can let these input fields be automatically generated from the PHP Format by leaving the fields blank.

We’d like to really thank Jory Hogeeven for both this addition and the fix he provided for all the [if][/if] Pods Template tag blocks for properly detecting empty fields.

Pods Templates Fixes

Speaking of Pods Templates, this release also provides some needed fixes that have been plaguing the effectiveness of Pods Templates for a while. You’re now able to use the {@post_content} magic tag and shortcodes within your Pods Templates without odd things occurring. Plus, thanks to James Golovich, we’ve cleared out all of the outstanding nested shortcode issues in Pods Templates and odd behaviors with images not providing their additional details when looping through [each][/each] blocks. We are planning to improve Pods Templates through a major overhaul in our upcoming releases, so stay tuned.

Many Thanks to Our Friends and Beta Testers

We wouldn’t have moved this particular release to production as quickly as we did if it hadn’t been for the help of our Friends of Pods who help out with donations and testing and the many, many users who jumped on our Slack and downloaded the beta and tested it. This was truly a group effort.

As always, you can find read about all the changes in our changelog on GitHub and download the new update from the WordPress Plugin Repository.