102 – WordPress Custom Post Types

Announcements

WordPress iPhone / iPad app is updated to 3.2.1
– No need to login with username / password
– Clean interface for editing posts and pages
– Full access to the dashboard from within the app

Listener Feedback

Jason’s Question about Google Libraries

Decreased Latency

• A Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributies your static files across servers from different diverse physical locations, so the download will take place from the closest location

Increased Parallelism

• Browsers limit the number of connections of simultaneous downloads

Better Caching

• If a visitor to your site already has downloaded a version of jQuery from Google, then they won’t have to download it again

Gerald (http://memphisdigitalmedia.com)
I use Backup Buddy too and backup to several different places. One way I backup my clients is to create a Gmail account for their backups. Then I set BackupBuddy to email the database to that Gmail account. Gmail has a lot storage space if you just use it for you database.

Understand WordPress Custom Post Types

• A custom post type is your own post type; testimonials, portfolios, blogs etc
• If you think of WordPress as a site-building framework, custom post types are the different kinds of content blocks that make up your website. For example, you can have a unique post type for portfolio items, houses for sale, podcasts, journal entries, or anything that might warrant its own formatting. If a site is set up specifically for a client who is not so familiar with WordPress, a custom post type can be easier to understand than sorting out posts and pages, which have more of a generic meaning. Adding custom post types is a helpful way to tailor a WordPress site specifically for the content that it will be delivering.
• It allows you to present your data the way you want to. You can hide data and choose to present to the audience only when required. This is especially useful when you wish to segregate your default queries from specialized queries thus organizing your information and choosing what information will be public and what information will be specialized.
• Improved usability: simply it is quite complex to tell a client, “To post a podcast, you must do A, B, C, and D. To post a blog post, you must do A, B, and C.” Custom post types allow you to create one singular process that makes sense to the non-programmer and non-power user.
• Hide content from default queries: It’s not that you are hiding content per se; however, out of the box, custom post types are not included in the query further customizing the ability to organize and present the content the way you want. Without additional coding, custom post types are not included in the default queries. Furthermore, the customization options allowed in registering custom post types further increases the beauty and power of custom post types by making them non-public and non-queryable.

Links
– http://wpmu.org/explore-the-power-of-custom-post-types-to-maximize-wordpress-as-a-cms/
– http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/plugins/a-guide-to-wordpress-custom-post-types-creation-display-and-meta-boxes/
– Custom Post Type UI