The Pods CMS Framework plugin will let you define your own tables in the WP database, and also give you the tools to enter, display, and edit the entries.
You don’t need Pods for what you want. Don’t get me wrong, Pods does a great job, but it’s not required for this.
All that you need to do is create categories (fonts, images, etc), and use these to categorise your posts to keep them organised. There’s no need for any extra plugins or anything that’s not core WordPress.
Using Custom Post Types (through any plugin or theme) can better help organize data when they aren’t directly related to each other. I suggest using Custom Post Types to separate your different types of information, as it will greatly reduce the pain of administering everything under “Posts” separated by categories.
Unless you only have one type of content, or very little amount of content on your site, then in those cases you’ll find Custom Post Types could be overkill unless you needs fields specific to each case.
Thread Starter
Your Dad
(@voodoochild16)
Hey guys,
My worry is finding a plugin that is useful, but eventually discontinued down the road by the developer, and not compatible with future versions of WordPress. Say if this database WordPress blog would be around for 10-20 years, I think that’s something worth thinking about for myself.
But I was mainly just wondering about this database thing out of curiousity, as I have noticed other free web platforms other than WordPress that are Database platforms, but I know WordPress more than anything, and I just like to stick to what I’m used to.
But any ways, I think that just using categories is a great idea. But my question is, do other big sites use WordPress with the categories as a database aswell?. Thank you all for your helpful replies.
I’ve done it before, many times. Most times it’s been used for news articles, but it’s the same theory behind everything. Use categories and tags to set up… well, categories! Then you’ll only need to have the cateogires in your navigation somewhere, and you can choose to include a tag cloud if you want to, but it’s all up to you. As I said for me this is always the easiest way to go because there’s no plugins, no extras, and I’m only working with WordPress core functionality.
Having said that, without a concrete idea of exactly what you want, it’s actually not easy to say that this will suit. Even though it works for a lot of cases it won’t work for everything.
Thread Starter
Your Dad
(@voodoochild16)
Well that solution probably works great for fonts, free images, lyrics, and much more, which is all I was referring to as examples of what you could use the WordPress core for. As long as you make it easily navigatable for the viewer, it’s okay.
Big sites use Custom Post Types to organize their content when it’s not really just categorization. So if you are storing Books and Authors, you wouldn’t just put those things as Posts and categorize them, but set up two content types.
If you choose a plugin to help you, remember nothing is forever, but if you’re going to pick one, consider the longevity and involvement with WordPress from the author(s) of it. That may be a good indicator for you.
If you do decide to go with Custom Post Types and don’t need all the flexibility of Pods, the Custom Post Type UI plugin might be a solution.
The beauty of that plugin is that it provides an easy way to create and manage CPT’s and taxonomies, but does not delete the CPT’s content even if the plugin is deleted. You could manually re-register the CPT’s and continue without the plugin.
Right, and that plugin offers an export which lets you take the code and disable the plugin.
