This is going to be a short post. Magic Tags are very awe­some, but on the Pods CMS doc­u­men­ta­tion failed to men­tion some­thing very sim­ple yet use­ful. Before any­thing, here’s a quick run down of what Magic Tags are…

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Soft­ware note: :pods: Ver­sion 1.7.3 / WP 2.8.4

Doc­u­men­ta­tion: http://pods.uproot.us/codex/helpers

What are Input Helpers

An Input Helper lets you com­pletely cus­tomize the appear­ance of any input field… when adding new data contents.

In plain n00b Eng­lish: as an exam­ple, the default field “name” I had it to store last names, and a sep­a­rate col­umn to store first names (fname). The prob­lem of that would be when you’re using Bi-directional rela­tion­ship PICK col­umn to another Pod (let’s call this: Per­son) is you can only relate one of the columns, not both First Name and Last Name. So if you use the PICK col­umn the “name”; which stores the Last Names, and with the last name like John­son – you prob­a­bly can’t tell which John­son that is. Input Helpers can grab and dis­play the full names for you when you’re adding data. (more…)

I’ve been very silent on Face­book, Twit­ter, and this blog lately. That because I can’t con­stantly access Twit­ter any­more from work, they blocked me… so no more use­ful stuff to tweet and brag about excepted one thing: Pods CMS. Pods CMS is a Word­Press plu­gin that pretty much turn your blog into a CMS. You can build a Wiki, Glos­sary, Recipes, Hotel list­ing etc… the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. Although, you will need to know at least some PHP to make this thing tuned to the way you want it to be. I have been play­ing with it in the past 2 weeks, I have to say I am very impress of how this plu­gin works. So I did a test on one of my hob­bies: Kendo. I’ve always wanted to col­lect data on Kendo Dojo, how many prac­ti­tion­ers, and Kendo tour­na­ment results in the U.S. I was able to cre­ate this very com­plex data­base that it can be listed by Fed­er­a­tions, State, Coun­try, Dojo, and down to the indi­vid­ual Kendo-ist data. The awe­some thing is? Each list­ing can be linked to one another. For exam­ple, if you view­ing by Fed­er­a­tions, you can list all the Dojo in that fed­er­a­tion, and with links to each Dojo AND the state. You can add BUILT-IN fil­ters and search on top! The back­end is all done for you, all you have to do is to make things pretty. Ain’t that grant?

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