One powerful aspect of Thesis 2 is its ability to easily take advantage of custom post types and custom post meta. We show off this ability in this short seminar on creating a recipe website using the Types plugin and the BYOB Thesis 2 Simple Post Meta Fields box. We start off by identifying the type of content that we want to create a custom input for, such as “ingredients” and “cooking directions”. Next we create the custom post type for the recipes and create the custom post meta for the recipes. Once the post type is created we customize the recipes template. We install the Simple Post Meta Fields box and then place our post meta in the template.
This combination of tools makes creating this type of site a snap for the non-programmer. What used to take reams of PHP code to create can now be done point and click – drag and drop.
Part 1 – Introduction
We talk about using Custom Post Types to set up a Recipe Site in part 1 of our seminar How to Create a Recipe Site Using Thesis 2 with Custom Post Types & Custom Post Meta.
Rick: So you want to do a recipe style thing like this here.
Member: Yes, yes.
Rick: Where they’ve got a regular post and then there’s this recipe information down below it?
Member: That’s correct, yeah. Nicely laid out with the ingredients and the method and then the cooking time and all that stuff there.
Rick: Okay, and..
Using Custom Post Types
Member: And the way I want to do it is by creating a custom post where I just put in the information and then after that, they’ll be laid out automatically like this.
Rick: Okay.
Member: Now, it doesn’t have to be like super complicated exactly like this one but it’s just the process of doing it. And then for the rest you know, if you could show me exactly how it’s done and then after that I could just go and play with CSS and then add a few things here and there just to make it perfect. It’s just a question of like the process of doing it.
Rick: Well, see the thing here is that most of this is just standard HTML, right so there’s actually very little difference between this and this.
Member: Okay.
Rick: Right? I mean you could have an ingredients field or you could have a field where you just type in ingredients and then type in your things then type in method and then type in your things, right?
Member: That’s right.
Rick: So it’s kind of up to you how you would do this but you could start off by creating post meta. Now, were you talking about doing this as custom post types as well?
Member: Yeah, that’s right.
Rick: So then let’s see, so where am I now? Restore my default here so I’m back to plain ordinary Thesis.