PSD to WordPress, PSD to HTML, PSD to Drupal

For quite a long time, Drupal has been preferred while choosing CMS before the site development due to its Content Type flexible mechanism. Not many people know that this functionality had been laid to WordPress long ago. The only thing that was missing – a convenient mechanism to use this opportunity, especially in the admin panel of the site.

Drupal – is a really powerful framework for site creation, but the main disadvantage of this CMS is the complexity of its admin panel interface. Quite often, after creating the site we had to write manuals how to use administrative panel for clients and their workers. WordPress wins several points in this comparison – it has user-friendly interface and clients never ask questions like that.

Custom Post Type appears in the WordPress 3 version. It is a complete analog of Content Type in Drupal. Let’s examine these two CMS and their main features and you will see that their concepts are rather similar:

• WordPress calls all content items “posts” (which is the generic term for the more specific “Pages” and “Posts” ). Drupal on the other hand alternates between calling content items “Content” at times and “Nodes” at other times.Both engines have ability to add more sections to admin panel. WordPress calls it Custom Post Type (standard Post Types are Posts and Pages), and Drupal have Custom Content Type (standard are Page and Story).
• Both WordPress and Drupal use the term “Theme” to refer to the collection of files that collectively create the unique look and feel for a site.
• Both WordPress and Drupal has Taxonomy module. Standard taxonomies are Category and Tags. You can add these taxonomies to any content type (or post type) or create new taxonomies.
• For extensibility both WordPress and Drupal support the concept of componentized functionality with WordPress calling their functionality “plugins” and Drupal calling their functionality “modules”.

After WordPress 3 was released in March, many innovations weren’t used, because the creation of a new Post type required theme editing or writing plugins to register new data types. While in Drupal it could be done in admin panel by a few clicks.

And then a plugin that automates the creation of custom post types was developed. It’s called Custom Post Type UI. This plugin has been tested and got on wordpress.org and it is a powerful tool that allows you to create a new post types, create new taxonomy and tie the taxonomy to post type.

The plugin page has a video demonstration on how to use it and its main functions. This video is a bit out-of-date and refers to an older version of the plugin. A newer version of the plugin has more features and functions.

After it is installed, we’ll see a new menu to the left where we can create a new post type, taxonomy, or manage existing ones:

The next Drupal‘s advantage was module CCK (“Content Creation Kit”). It makes possible to create custom fields for specific types of content (eg for the Product type we could add fields Price, Weight, Color, Image etc.). WordPress has a built-in structure for additional fields that is called Custom Fields. Again, it wasn’t as convinient as a CCK module.

But note – the module CCK isn’t included into the standard package of modules (at least before the release of Drupal 7, which was released recently – January 5, 2011). So do not just disregard WordPress. WordPress also has a similar module that uses the mechanism of Custom Fields to create new fields. This plugin is called Custom Fields. While working with the plugin, we found a critical bug – fields can’t be cleaned after saving. Therefore, we recommend using our revised version, which has this bug fixed. It can be downloaded here.

After installing a new paragraph Fields appears in each menu section. Setting up of new fields is quite similar to a standard mechanism for WP widgets – you drag a box, indicate its settings and it appears on the editing post page.

This plugin extensive opportunities and – most important, it contains a lot of hooks and is able to expand. Thus, without changing the plugin code you can add new types and fields with your plugin.

In its standard version there was no convenient pictures and files upload. It is not always obvious that the post has gallery and much more compelling for the users to have just a separate field to upload pictures or files.

We’ve developed our own plugin as addon to the Custom Fields to resolve this issue. We named it JustCoded Custom Fields. At the moment plugin includes widgets for images and files uploading (you can upload more than one picture at a time). We’ve also added a new widget called Fields Group – it allows you to create a group of fields, which can be added multiple times (for example, if you need data table). You can download and try our plugin by clicking here.

Check out how custom fields look below:

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Implementation, Just Labs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.