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?

The prob­lem of this awe­some plu­gin that it is quite new, the doc­u­men­ta­tions, tuto­ri­als, and resources are quite lim­ited. But the devel­op­ers are extremely help­ful on their own forum – so you’ll have to do a lot of dig­ging to find the answers you need… in which I did. I also found the tuto­ri­als were kind of half way done, they stopped at dis­play­ing the data, but not show­ing how to write sim­ple Dis­play Helper and Input Helper. So I’m going to jog that down here.

If you have not gone through the doc­u­men­ta­tions and have some basic data to play with, you should get going (think­ing putting one sim­ple guide of how to put all the pods together later).

Dis­claimer:

The fol­low­ing helpers are very basic ones that I found myself used them a lot and repeat­edly, so hope­fully these will be use­ful for some­one else also.  On a side note that I am NOT a hard­core PHP coder, I under­stood enough basic PHP codes to cus­tomize them. If you know a bet­ter way, feel free.

So let’s get rolling…

Soft­ware Note: Pods CMS 1.7.3 / WP 2.8.4

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

Dis­play Helpers: Dis­play Helpers are the codes that help to dis­play your results in a nicer, cus­tomized look.  For exam­ple, say that you want to show all of your ingre­di­ents in a recipe, by default, they’ll be list as such: “Ingre­di­ent 1Ingredient 2″ – it is hard to read.  So you can write a Dis­play Helper to show them as “Ingre­di­ent 1, Ingre­di­ent 2″.  Got it?

By default, the Dis­play Helper passes $value as an array for you to manip­u­late as such: $value[0][’column_name’].

Adding a Dis­play Helper

Adding a new Dis­play Helper is very sim­ple, see below:

Pods CMS – Add new Dis­play Helper

List Sin­gle Result ONLY (No Link)

Add a new Dis­play Helper and name this one some­thing like “print_r”:

1

<?php print_r($value[0]['name']); ?>

<?php print_r($value[0]['name']); ?>

I have these two generic Dis­play Helpers dis­play­ing a sin­gle result only.  By default, if you hav­ing some­thing like {@column_name}, it will show column’s name and it is linked to a its own detailed page (if it is bi-directional), some­thing like (http://domain.com/your_pod/column_name/1).  Where the very last part is actu­ally the row ID.  So what if you want to dis­play your data with a cus­tom permalink/slug?  Such as: (http://domain.com/your_pod/slug_name)  This helper will come in handy in your Pod Tem­plates page:

1

<a href="/pod_name/{@slug}">{@column_name,print_r}</a>

<a href="/pod_name/{@slug}">{@column_name,print_r}</a>

You prob­a­bly noticed that I put the helpers right next to the Magic Tags instead of adding the Dis­play Helpers like this:

Dis­play Helper

It’s a mat­ter of per­sonal pref­er­ence really. If you want, you can add the helper inside the admin inter­face. If you’d rather add the Dis­play Helper through the admin inter­face, you don’t need to add “print_r” inside {@print_r}.

Dis­play­ing Arrays

The fol­low­ing will dis­play “Ingre­di­ent 1, Ingre­di­ent 2, Ingre­di­ent 3″ instead of “Ingre­di­ent 1Ingredient 2Ingredient 3″ with links or no link to your liking:

".$val['name']."";
    }
echo implode(', ', $output);
} else {
   echo "No record found";
}
?>

If you just want to dis­play the results with­out the links, sim­ply remove the “href” on line 8.

Note: This helper will only link to cur­rent pod, what I mean: “/pod1/slugname”, but not able to link “/pod2/slugname”. The rea­son is that this script will only grab the pod’s name which is “/pod1″ and add itself to the “a href…”. If you want to link to a dif­fer­ent pod, you’ll just have to add a new helper with a minor change of instead of ‘$pod’ (line 8 ) where the “a href…” is to your actual pod’s name, make sense?

Well, that’s it for now… next up, :inputHelper:.