Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

More Fields WordPress Plugin

June 15, 2010

Although Word­Press is a CMS, it’s admin­is­tra­tive panel was clearly designed to favor it as a per­sonal blog­ging solu­tion. You really have to know what you are doing to use the Word­Press dash­board to man­age a web­site ver­sus a blog. This does not make Word­Press as an ideal solu­tion to pass off a web­site to a site owner to man­age and cre­ate their own content.

This was a sit­u­a­tion I was faced with last fall. One of the objec­tives of the project was that the solu­tion would enable the client to man­age their own con­tent. Their cur­rent site was com­pletely sta­tic and they had been depen­dent on some­one who could edit HTML code. They no longer had any­one on their team with those skills and their site had become stagnant.

Because I was famil­iar with Word­Press and the price (free, open-source) was right for this non-profit min­istry, I wanted to use Word­Press as the CMS solu­tion. But I needed to be able to tweak the default Word­Press dash­board to pro­vide a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence for the client.

As I searched for CMS plu­g­ins, I came across More Fields after read­ing a post on Kevin Leary’s site. I installed it and began to use it. I really like how it cus­tomized the Word­Press Admin sec­tion for man­ag­ing page con­tent. I gave me just the func­tion­al­ity I needed. It was just the right solu­tion to give a more usable inter­face for my client to man­age and cre­ate their own con­tent. I cre­ated a cus­tomized home­page that allowed them to post infor­ma­tion about dif­fer­ent con­fer­ences and lead­er­ship projects that they spon­sor. I cre­ated a PDF guide that helped the client to take the site and manage/add new content.

What I liked about More Fields

• It used the exist­ing cus­tom fields func­tion­al­ity of Word­Press. I did not have to make changes to my code in my Word­Press tem­plate in order to use the plugin.
• It added boxes to the page or post edit­ing pages. I was able to put in descrip­tions and instruc­tions to help my client man­age their sec­ondary content.
• It allowed me to cus­tomize the page and post edit­ing pages. I had many options of what to show and what to hide.
• It was fairly easy and intu­itive to imple­ment right away. I was able to cre­ate new boxes and new fields with­out hav­ing to read a bunch of documentation.

But no solu­tion is per­fect and there were sev­eral quirks in More Fields that did not set well with me. So I was a bit ret­i­cent about using it on a recent project.

Here were some of my con­cerns. Most of these were quirks that were annoy­ing but still functional.

• The plu­gin had not been updated in quite awhile. This was my great­est con­cern. The plu­gin needed a bit more work and I was not sure that its cre­ator was plan­ning to do any­thing more with it. If that was the case, the quirks I expe­ri­enced were not going to get fixed.
• The plu­gin allowed you to hide cer­tain pan­els when edit­ing pages. Soon after a Word­Press upgrade, that func­tion­al­ity broke and sev­eral of the pan­els I wanted to hide were vis­i­ble once again.
• When adding new fields, after sav­ing changes to the new field, I went to a blank screen. I had expected and wanted to return to the man­age boxes page to add more fields or edit cur­rent ones.
• The cus­tomized panel seemed to cre­ate con­flicts with the AJAX func­tion­al­ity that allows you to reorder pan­els and hide/show cer­tain pan­els on an Edit Page.
• The plu­gin added the cus­tom page types to the left hand menu of the admin­is­tra­tive inter­face. It cre­ated a main nav item with the name of the cus­tom field type and two sub items of “edit” and “add new.” If you clicked on the name of the cus­tom page type on that menu, it would not take you to the edit pages list­ing but would func­tion like “add new.” This was dif­fer­ent than the other main head­ings on the left menu.

Recent Devel­op­ments

Recently, I had another project that needed some cus­tomiza­tion to make it a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for the site owner. Because of my con­cerns about More Fields, I decided to try another plu­gin. Unfor­tu­nately, this plu­gin had some major issues and the devel­oper was not attend­ing to it.

Then I came across another post by Kevin Leary about new devel­op­ment to the More Fields plu­gin. I was delighted and excited to check it out. The new ver­sion of the plu­gin addressed all of my con­cerns. It did not dis­ap­point me. I plan to use it in future projects and would not have any prob­lem in rec­om­mend­ing it to others.

Thanks Kal and Hen­rik for improv­ing More Fields.

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