WordPress Creation Kit helps you develop intuitive WordPress sites, easily manageable by your clients, in half the time and without writing a single line of PHP code.

However, this is somewhat hard to visualize, so to that end we created a WordPress Creation Kit video explaining:

• what is WCK
• what you can do with it, in a tutorial like structure.
• walking through almost all of the modules inside WCK

I tried to keep it as short as possible so consider this as a basic introduction.

Also we have MORE videos planned in the future, so if you have suggestions or thoughts you want to share, now is the time!

I’m not a programmer… I do know some basic html and css, but I was nervous about messing with any of the templates in fear of making a bigger mess than where I started.

That’s a quote from one of our customers. We hear this quite a lot, not everybody is a developer. Most WordPress users just want something simple to understand and quick to get started with.

So you can’t help but wonder if the WordPress templates system couldn’t have been designed differently?

When you’re starting out it’s just painful. You would do anything BUT custom code your WordPress templates:

• research 10+ plugins HOPPING they can solve your problem
• start using a lot of shortcodes inside the content area
• consider reading that 5 parts HUGE article explaining how to custom code your own WordPress templates

You might even say, “Well, now that’s something you need to learn. Here’s the X or Y awesome tutorials on the matter!”

But the truth is, WordPress templates ARE complicated for a large number of WordPress users.
You’ll bump into:

• WordPress Template Hierarchy
• WordPress Loop
• get_post_meta to list your custom fields and metaboxes
• Oh…and there is also this small thing called WP_Query

As for learning about the WordPress templates system, all those articles and tutorials are just copying mechanisms. Just search Google for “develop WordPress theme” and you’ll find OVER 8 MILLION results!

Why does there have to be so many articles teaching you this? Should WordPress Templates really be so hard to understand?

Swift Templates beta for WordPress Creation Kit

Swift Templates helps you build front-end templates directly from the WordPress admin UI, without writing a single line of PHP code.

It turns a time consuming and error prone process that was previously only accessible to developers into a straight forward UI that with a little bit of HTML and CSS allows you to:

• create archive listings for your custom post types including pages or posts
• modify the single cpt page template to include ALL your custom fields and metaboxes
• overwrite the default listing for your all single CPT’s with the one defined above
• overwrite the default content with a template that gives you access to your custom fields and metaboxes

How does it work?

There are two (2) main cases where you can use Swift Templates.

1. Archive listing of CPT’s

Useful for:

• normal archive pages with your own design (not theme dependent). Just create your templates, create a normal page that will contain the archive and add the swift-template shortcode
• simple listings of posts or custom post types in any landing page on your site

(using the swift-template shortcode). Create your templates, setup the arguments and put the swift-template shortcode

Quickly create templates for posts, pages or custom post types that can include default WordPress information (the title, content, thumbnail, etc.) or Custom Fields previously defined with WordPress Creation Kit.

You can create read-more links to point to a Swift dynamically generated single template OR the default permalink.

Also, another really useful function is the possibility to overwrite the default content on that post with the single template, thus applying that template for ALL default single listings of your custom post type.

2. Single page listing of CPT’s

Useful for creating one off templates for pages or single posts / custom posts.

Let’s say you have a team page, with some extra fields for name, avatar and description. You can now overwrite the default page template with one that supports your extra fields available for that page only.

Why Beta?

In order to get this out to our customers we had to launch without some features that will make building WordPress custom templates even more … swift

Coming soon:

• new pre-processed swift tags that will list ALL fields in a metabox with a default HTML and CSS – you’ll be able to make perfectly styled templates in under a minute.
• swift tags support for custom taxonomies
• search tag for archive templates (have a CPT called books.. this will let you search inside them)

Got you interested? Here’s how to get it

As of today, Swift Templates is available with the latest version of WordPress Creation Kit PRO.

For all previous WCK PRO and Lifetime clients, Swift Templates will be available via automatic updates or the account page.

What about WordPress templates?

Swift templates are NOT a 1 to 1 replacement to WordPress templates. That would be stupid! WordPress templates are complicated for a reason, there are a LOT of things to display in WordPress and that flexibility comes with a lot of complexity.

However, we’re hoping for Swift Templates in combination with the rest of WordPress Creation Kit to take you 80% there in 80% of cases. If we can achieve that, I’ll be one happy developer!

Custom fields have revolutionized developing sites with WordPress and creating custom fields is becoming easier every day.

There are several plugins that simplify this task and make it easy for you to define custom fields and metaboxes with just a couple of clicks.

However, the pain starts when you try to display all this information in your templates. For this you’ll need to write code and you’re not really comfortable doing that.

You start by searching the Codex for functions that are supposed to make this tasks simple. But they’re not that straight forward, and after spending precious time trying to fit all the pieces together, you decide this process is too slow. You project needs to be finished yesterday!

So you bounce to using copy paste tutorials without actually understanding what they do. This sound easier, but it all falls apart when you realize you suddenly have some error handling and bug tracking to do.

Why does a simple thing, like getting information regarding images or users, need so many lines of code? Can’t it be simpler and more intuitive?

What if you could use simple to understand functions that give you what you want directly in your templates without extra work to process that information?

What if you could?

• Save time by writing fewer lines of code (than using standard WordPress functions)
• Avoid error handling and bugs that will eventually appear once more and more code is added
• Get access directly to preprocessed data

Introducing WCK Custom Fields API

WCK Custom Fields API is meant to help you with just that. It consists of 3 easy to use, yet powerful functions that make it really easy to work with custom fields in your templates.

Let’s say you need to simply display a custom field in your theme.
With standard WordPress functions you’ll do something like this:

<?php 
$my_meta = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'my_meta_name', true ); 
if( !empty( $my_meta[0]['field-name'] ) ) 
    echo 'Value:'.$my_meta[0]['field-name']; 
?>

Instead using WCK Custom Fields API, you’ll simply need one line of code:

 <?php the_cfc_field('my_meta_name', 'field-name'); ?>

*The function automatically detects the type of field and outputs values accordingly.


Things remain as simple even if you’re dealing with a repeater field, and need to output a specific entry (e.g. the second entry).
Instead of:

<?php
$my_meta = get_post_meta($post ->ID, 'my_meta_name', true);
if (!empty($my_meta[1]['field_name'])) {
    echo $my_meta[1]['field_name'];
}
?>

You’ll have:

 <?php the_cfc_field('my_meta_name','field_name', false, 1); ?>

*The 1 at the end, tells which entry to display (index starts at 0).

For frequently used fields like Image Upload, User Select or Custom Post Type Select(for relationships between posts), things become even more complicated with standard functions.

Let’s say you want to display the avatar image from a metabox:

<?php
$my_meta = get_post_meta( $post -> ID, 'my_meta_name', true);
if (!empty($my_meta[0]['avatar'])){
    $src = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $my_meta[0]['avatar'], 'full' );
    echo '<img src="'.$src[0].'" width="'. $src[1].'" height="'.$src[2].'"/>';
}
?>

Using the Custom Fields API this will simply be:

 <img src="<?php the_cfc_field('my_meta_name', 'avatar'); ?>" />

*The API function will automatically process and return only the URL.

You can also forget about error handling, no extra verifications being necessary when using the API functions.

This was just a quick glimpse of what can be achieved using the new WCK Custom Fields API. For mode details and code examples have a look at our documentation page.

Want to build a bullet proof, content adding interface for your clients, dead simple to use?

WordPress Creation Kit helps YOU to improve the usability of the sited you build, making them manageable by your clients. Your very own repeater custom fields and groups, custom post type and taxonomy creator with front-end posting.

On WCK powered websites, clients will be able to easily enter their content without getting confused by shortcodes, html and who knows what else, because the UI will look and feel like it’s part of WordPress.

What’s new?

• Options Page Creator – you to create new admin menu items called “Client Site Options” which can hold advanced custom field groups (just like any other edit page).
• More extra-field types: Date, User Select, Country Select.
• Automatic Updates via the WordPress Plugins interface.
• Quite a few bugfixes and small improvements.
• Multiple versions at different pricing points. (We have a Pro and Hobbyist version available now)