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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

Custom post type are part of the core though, there's just no admin UI for it. That's really all these plugins provide.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types

You should be defining them in your theme anyways for source control.

Exactly. It already is a general purpose CMS just by having the Page post type as well as the Post post type. I think it arguably is a great CMS for it's custom post type capabilities. I love me some WordPress.

No, you should be defining custom post types in a custom plugin for source control. That way, your code still works if they change theme, or you replace it when you remake the theme a few years down the line. Otherwise the client will inevitably switch theme, then find all their custom content inaccessible.

And I do think even though this API exists, it should definitely be improved upon and given a built in interface. I mean, don't other CMS scripts like Drupal provide a way to add custom fields and things in core, via a visual interface?

Yes, you should because dealing with keeping that in sync between dev, staging, production is a major hassle.

If you are changing your theme and using custom post types, you still have to modify the theme to support the custom post types. So copy and paste, or isolate the custom post types to a separate file and include in your functions.php.

If you're doing it any other way, then you honestly don't really know what you are doing.

Not really. If you're not running a test site, put the theme and custom plugins inside another folder and commit that to Git or SVN. If you are running a test site, oommit the wp-content folder, with the uploads directory and any third party code set as ignored.

And the way I suggest is also what a lot of WordPress experts suggest, as seen here:

http://justintadlock.com/archives/2013/09/14/why-custom-post...

http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/wordpress-custom-post-type...

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/11/complete-guide-cust...

There are pros and cons for both methods.

Personally, I much prefer to put functionality in a plugin and the theme limited to the frontend presentation. To suggest that I don't know what I'm doing is, well... Incorrect.

Syncing production, staging, and dev is an unrelated and solved problem.

I stand corrected. Still I think many other CMSes have this functionality in core and thus allow plugins to extend on it.

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