One of the biggest things I have been looking forward to in the upcoming WordPress 3.0 release are Custom Post Types. Funnily enough though, now they’re actually on their way, I’m not so excited about them any more.

This is mostly due to the wonderful Pods framework by Matt Gibbs and Scott Kingsley Clark. Pods is a WordPress Plugin, but in reality almost a CMS in its own right. It allows you to create all kinds of custom post types, along with customized admin screens (with the Pods UI add-on) that blend nicely with the WP interface.

Why use a plugin?

My biggest complaint with custom post types in WP is that they’ll still all be happily together in the same monolithic wp_posts database table as all other WP posts and pages. Not very efficient, is it?

Pods is different. It creates separate tables for each post type and works the way relational databases are supposed to. Thus it’s potentially much more scalable!

Still, easier custom post types are a nice and welcome addition to WP and will probably be fine for smaller sites. You can read more about other nice things coming in version 3.0 over at WPBeginner: What’s coming in WordPress 3.0