Step 1: Set up the Pod

I’m assuming you’ve already installed/activate both the PodsCMS and Pods UI plugins. If not, please do so before starting.

Create a new Pod called “logins”.

By default each pod is created with a name and slug field. We’re going to use the name field but you can delete the slug field.

Then you’ll need to create a field for “date”. Of course, Pods stores the date any entry is created in a field called “created” which you can access from within Pods Templates. But it still makes sense to have a date field in the Pod itself, if nothing else for the sake of a clear data model.

So once you have added the date field your Pod will look like this:

Step 2: Add function

Now just add the following code to your functions.php file.

add_action('set_logged_in_cookie','mpv_add_access_log_entry');
function mpv_add_access_log_entry($user) {
	$user = explode('|',$user);
	$log = new PodAPI();
	$params = array('datatype'=>'logins');
	$params['columns'] = array('name'=>$user[0],'date'=>date('Y-m-d H:i:s'));
	$log->save_pod_item(pods_sanitize($params));
}

This function uses the Pod API to insert a row in the logins table. Alternatively you can use the $wpdb class and do something like this:

global $wpdb;
$wpdb->insert($wpdb->prefix.'pod_tbl_logins',array('name'=> $user[0],'date'=> date('Y-m-d H:i:s')));

The only trouble with going this route is that in order to use the pods admin interface to manage the data, you’ll also need to add a row to the wp_pod table. This will change with Pods 2.0 so there’s no need to demonstrate. But I strongly recommend using the PodsAPI class as it will make sure to implement best practices and in 2.0 it will use the $wpdb class anyway.

So that’s it. To create an exportable report of the logins just install the “Exports and Reports” plugin. Or you can use PodsUI to create a custom interface.

Have fun.

The really great thing about flutter is that it still stores the field values in the  wp_postmeta table which means you don’t have to worry about any real data migration. So you have the luxury of taking it a step at a time.

The first step is to convert those key categories attached to “write panels” into post types. I did this by registering the post type as usual and simply running the following function on the init hook. This function performs a simple DB query to update posts with the specified cat slug into post_types.


function convert_cats_to_types($cat,$type) {
global $wpdb;
$query = $wpdb->prepare("
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_type = '$type' WHERE ID IN
(
SELECT DISTINCT object_id FROM wp_term_relationships rel
INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_taxonomy_id = rel.term_taxonomy_id AND tt.taxonomy = 'category'
INNER JOIN wp_terms AS t ON t.term_id = tt.term_id AND t.slug = '$cat'
)
");
$results = $wpdb->query($query);
}

There’s no risk of losing data here, we are just changing where the posts in question are show up. The second thing to do is to replace the field-specific metaboxes. We’ll cover that in the next post.

WordPress PodsCMS Widgets – Version 0.1

At any rate, for anyone who’s running a pods installation and having trouble getting SEO friendly titles on your pod pages, this plugin creates a template tag <?php pods_seo_title(); ?> that you can use to override wordpress default behavior. The plugins check to see if the page is a pod page, and if so calls the title of the respective pod. If not, it checks to see if the page is singular and returns the TITLE | SITENAME format if it is. Otherwise it returns the SITENAME | SITE DESCRIPTION form.

Download: Pods SEO Titles