fireproofsocks

I’m sorry, I still don’t know what you’re referring to. The plugin’s name is “Custom Content Type Manager”. That’s defined in the plugin’s primary file (index.php) and in the plugin’s readme.txt file. The “Break out of Your Blog” is just a descriptive tagline… using the CCTM lets you get more out of wordpress and do more than what you can with a simple blog. I am not the author of the Custom Field Template, so I can’t comment on it. I’m still not sure exactly what you’re asking, but hopefully that clarifies.

Man, that’s a good question — this is definitely more of a general WP and styling question though, so I’m not sure I’m the best one to take a guess at how to solve your particular problem.

Sorry if you’re having problems. I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you’d like to report a bug, I’d need to know specific details — see https://code.google.com/p/wordpress-custom-content-type-manager/wiki/ReportingBugs for more info.

This wiki page might be relevant to you: https://code.google.com/p/wordpress-custom-content-type-manager/wiki/get_posts_examples#List_Posts_in_a_Category (specifically that example with “List Posts in a Category”). The examples there rely on the PHP, but for most of them, there is a way to do the same query with the shortcode. E.g.

$args = array();
$args['post_type'] = 'article';
$args['post_status'] = 'publish';
$args['taxonomy'] = 'category';
$args['taxonomy_slug'] = 'howto';
$args['orderby'] = 'menu_order';
$args['order'] = 'ASC';

Becomes
[summarize_posts post_type="article" post_status="publish" taxonomy="category" taxonomy_slug="howto" orderby="menu_order" order="ASC"]

As I mentioned in the other post, you’ll notice that taxonomies and custom fields can become blurry. You can organize your data to use taxonomies — the advantage to that is you tie into existing WordPress functionality, but the disadvantage is that it’s opaque and hard to see.

Here’s one idea that might be relevant to you. You could create a dropdown custom field containing the possible values for your posts. E.g. a dropdown with “RV Books & Media”, “RV Blogs”, “RV Forums”, etc. and then attach that field to your post_type. It’s a good idea to use separate keys/values (e.g. rv_books => RV Books, rv_forums => RV Forums). For each post, you could select one of the values in your custom field. Then your search would look something like:

[summarize_posts post_type="your_post_type" your_dropdown_field="rv_books"]

You’ll notice here that taxonomies allow you to select multiple values (e.g. a post might be associated with both RV Books and RV Forums), whereas the dropdown option can only have one value. You would need to create separate pages for each query in that example.

Hope that makes sense — there are lots of ways to do this, but that’s one approach.

I added the feature request for you:
https://code.google.com/p/wordpress-custom-content-type-manager/issues/detail?id=554

MySQL should already be the default date format — if that’s not coming up, that’s a bug.

It can be disastrous for the plugin to attempt to alter formats after they have been entered because you run the risk of corrupting data, so that was very much a conscious decision to error on the side of safety. Values are changed only when creating new posts or editing existing ones and the date value is re-written to the database — that’s what I was referring to with my earlier comment about this situation being painful.

The messaging for date fields does recommend to use the MySQL date format because it’s sortable, but I still get posts like this fairly regularly so it would make a good feature request if you care to file it.

It’s helpful if you can boil this down to a short and specific question if possible.

If you want to remove all traces of a post type, there are global options in the CCTM settings page for you to do this — it’s not enabled by default because it does irreversibly delete items from your database.

Much of the discussion here seems to revolve around how to model your data — that’s a skill and not something I can impart easily. You do notice how the data structures for post_types and related posts starts to look a lot like taxonomies — it’s a grey area. Taxonomies in my mind enable you to search for and find your data more easily, whereas post_types and relations are the meat of the thing. Anything that you can think of that has a distinct and unchanging set of attributes works well as a post type — e.g. an “RV Periodical” might have a name, a publisher, a homepage link, etc. I’m not sure what you’re storing with a “forum”, but that might work simply as a single field: a link.

Not sure what other guidance I can offer.

As a side note: WordPress may not be the ideal tool to model data in this complexity. I say that often, but I’m rarely heeded.