16 sep
Happy Monday!
When we last left our heroes, I had just pushed to production on a Friday. 
It was an easy fix, so I didn’t anticipate that anything would actually blow up, but I’m still glad it didn’t blow up.
Today’s goals (hopefully)
- Computer software app icon upload issue
- Intranet custom post types
Custom post types
I’m reviewing a bit about WP custom post types, and I’m remembering now that I need to decide whether or not to make these custom post types a plugin or just add them to the theme itself. I think I’m going to go with a plugin just in case we decide to jump ship on this theme for whatever reason. It’s better to be prepared and create modular/changeable functionality in case someone up the chain wants something else from the intranet, that way I don’t have to re-code everything in a new theme down the road.
I’m creating a plugin for custom post types… now what? I need to decide what dictates each type of post (group blog, minutes) and what fields need to be available for these posts. I also need to think about whether these need custom taxonomies (my guess is yes).
Weird content types I need to decide what to do with:
- Groups
- groups also need members, a homepage, posts, and minutes
17 sep
I spent most of yesterday researching, learning about, and pondering how to use custom post types and some other plugins in order to achieve the desired behavior for groups and their related content. Here’s what I’m going to try today:
- Create a custom post type “Groups”
- Install Advanced Custom Fields plugin
- I believe the ACF plugin allows me to relate posts to other posts/pages
I’d really like to be able to have all the functionality of the groups directly in the Group interface, but that would require making a legit plugin, and ain’t nobody got time for that. Maybe there’s a plugin out there that does what I’m looking for?
plugins and integrations
There are tons of plugins out there that all do a version of what I’m aiming for but in different ways. I’m trying to narrow this process down to what will be easiest for users, but I just realized I don’t really even know who needs to be able to edit these things. Like, will there just be one group moderator that adds users, updates group info, and posts minutes?? Or do there need to be multiple admins per group?
In a perfect world, I’d develop a way for each group to have its own page. Each group would be assigned members based on roles/group settings. Those members could see a button on their front-end page like “create post” that would take them to the edit screen for the custom post type “group post” and already have the correct taxonomies/categories filled out but hidden. They publish the post and it shows up on the public page where everyone in the organization can see it but only group members can edit.
I bet this plugin exists somewhere, but describing it in such a way that I can find it will be next to impossible. And I don’t have time to go combing through plugins.
I’m going to do the next best thing: make it work. It won’t be pretty and it probably won’t be very user-friendly, but I have to start somewhere. I can always write documentation for group admins and hope that nothing is so confusing that they can’t figure it out. These are people with masters degrees, after all!
ACF
It seems like I can make a list of users in the ACF plugin and apply them to the Group custom post type. Then each group will have a query-able list of users, which maybe I can set as a variable in the Groups plugin I just installed??? I bet I can do that somehow. That way, when someone adds/deletes a member to a group, the Group restrictions automatically get updated without needing to change it in multiple places. Which would be perfect.