In my last blog post I mentioned that I wanted to create a custom post type for videos in WordPress here on SelfAssemblySites.
What’s a custom post type?
The concept is a lot simpler than it sounds. First some background: WordPress comes with two primary post types* already created for you - blog posts** – aka “Posts” with a capital ‘P’ – and site pages - aka “Pages” with a capital ‘P’.
Custom Post Types are simply other types of content rather than Pages or Posts, that can be displayed on your WordPress website. The type that I want to add is called Video – I want to add this special post type because I want to include additional meta data like video runtime, a summary of what’s in the video, a difficulty level, etc.
This image to the right is from our WordPress admin area shows how they appear once I’ve added them (code below). You can Add New Videos, view a list of videos just like viewing your Pages or Posts, etc.
What’s so great about that?
The real power is the meta data I mentioned – you can add and classify your content by all sorts of different criteria. For example, you could create a Movies custom post type, and add Director and Leading Actor information. You could create a movie reviews site, or even a site like IMDB (with a bit of work) :)
How I’ve used it
When you add a custom post type, you’ll normally want to add input fields into the custom post type’s Add New and Edit screens – I’ve included a screenshot below to show you what I’ve added to our Video custom post type. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but leave a comment below if you have any questions or suggestions – thanks for reading!
* WordPress also comes with some other post types used to store menus and other stuff).
** You can tell WordPress has its roots in blogging, because Posts is given primary position at the top of the Admin menu, but custom post types are one contributing factor to why it’s the most popular CMS in use today.
Most of the wordpress user or theme developer know the power of CPT. What you are trying to show here? what you have achieve? that doesn’t mean so much to us. what means is the code and how you achieve. So better you put your code and if you don’t wanna share your code than doesn’t mater what you have done. This info is useless and wasting time to read this. I was looking for some tutorial regarding the same and found your article on google and thought I got now solution but this is totally disappointing there is not code. We all know the power of CPT. So be little free minded and share your code to other than it will worth.
Hey Jatin,
Thanks for your comment. I can understand your frustration. The answers to your questions are in your comment itself.
Our primary audience for this post are not highly experienced WordPress users and theme developers, but rather those who are not familiar with WordPress and who don’t know the power of CPT (Custom Post Types).
I will gladly post up some CPT code examples – can you tell me what you want to do with CPT, so that I might be able to give a relevant code example?
Thanks for the feedback,
Alastair.
Funny you should mention that Gedy, as I believe he’s putting all that wonderful stuff that makes up the custom post video page into a beautifully neat little WordPress.Org plugin.
Could be a number of weeks but we’ll be sure to email you and let you know when it happens.
As a user of that wonderfully slick video page interface I can vouch for it’s ease of use and how straight forward it is.
Cheers!
Those are some great news! Thanks for letting me know. I’m definitely looking forward to it.
Hey Gedy,
Specifically what were you looking for such a plugin to do? Let me know and I’ll see what I can do :)
Cheers,
Alastair.
It would be awesome if there was a plugin for this :(