Types and Views Launching in Beta

   Amir

Announcements

November 14, 2011
13

After a long period of intensive development, we’re finally ready with a first release of both Views and Types.

What are Types and Views

Views and Types solve a great challenge to both experienced and beginner web developers:

How do I build a complex site with WordPress?

Views and Types let you define what your content will be like and display it in any way you choose.

  • Types defines content types
  • Views displays it

They are built for web developers, who are fluent in HTML and CSS, but have no desire to become PHP or WordPress experts. And, they’re pretty useful for established WordPress experts, who simply want to put their precious time to better use.

Here are some of the challenges that you can solve using Views, in 10 minutes or less:

  • Load content from the database and list it
  • Create sortable tables
  • Create AJAX sliders
  • Create your own image galleries
  • Paginate through wild amounts of data
  • Let visitors search and drill down for specific content

The beauty is, Types and Views are not designed specifically for any of the jobs. They are tool, which you can use to build almost anything. Just like you can build your own functionality with PHP, you can also build it with Views – just without the coding part!

Loading Content from the Database

Views includes a powerful query generator. You tell this generator what to load and how to order it. Then, start refining that selection using your combination of search filters.

For example, you want to load ‘events’ that are tagged as ‘ongoing’, associated with ‘women-rights’ taxonomy. No problem, you’ll tell Views to query ‘events’ and then add the ‘ongoing’ custom field and ‘women-rights’ taxonomy as filter.

Got too many results for one humble page? Simple enough – enable the pagination and Views breaks it up into different pages.

Displaying Content with Style

Once you tell Views what to show, it’s up to you how it gets displayed.

Remember that WordPress PHP loop? Well, you can forget about it.

With Views, you can use one of several preset display layouts, including lists, a grid or a table. And, you can go wild with your very own HTML and CSS. All you need to do is tell Views what HTML fragments to place inside the loop and it builds everything for you.

Views includes its own templates engine. No need to worry about learning yet another API. There are plenty of these already. Click on the V icon to insert any field which Views supports. You’ll be happy to see that custom types that you declared with Types appear there too. Did we mention that Views and Types shine together?

To create your templates, just write HTML. When you want to include a dynamic field, click on the V icon and insert it.

Fully WPML Compatible

Since we’re also responsible for WPML, it’s our commitment to make Types and Views fully compatible with WPML. This is more than a wish or ‘good idea’. If you ever find anything that’s not working together, we consider it as a bug and fix it right away.

We develop and test Types and Views as individual plugins, we also test them between themselves and with WPML. Our demo sites are all multilingual.

Yeah, Still in Beta

After long months of development, we’re happy to release Views and Types in Beta.

You can download it from Types page.

To get your hands on Views, you’ll need to buy it from us. This way, you get a great tool and we get to make a living.

When you purchase Views, you also get support for both Views and Types – directly from the developers.

Normally, support and upgrades are included for a year. After that year, it costs another 50% to renew them. However, as we’re still in Beta, we give lifetime support and upgrades. Anyone who buys now, never needs to renew to continue getting our support and code updates.

What do You Think?

Ideas? Feedback? Suggestions? Leave your comments here!

 

Comments 13 Responses

  1. How to migrate from “Custom Post Types UI?? to “Types?? in existing site?

    Please supply a tutorial or at least a short instruction for this.

    In which order should the plugins be installed/uninstalled without losing existing custom post type data.

    Did not find anything about that on homepage or FAQ.

    If I want to buy “Views??, then I would want to use “Types?? to define the custom post types, then I should know if/how I can migrate live customer sites from “Custom Post Type UI?? and not lose existing custom posts…

    • That’s next on our todo list. We’re going to have a migration tool from ‘Custom Post Types UI’ and from ‘Advanced Custom Fields’. I hope it will be ready by the end of this week.

      Also, we’re double checking and making sure that Views works smooth with other custom-types and custom-fields plugins. It may not work as well polished and integrated, but we need to check that it works without problems.

  2. Sorry to post this here, but I can’t see how else to contact you with possible bugs in Types (as I haven’t bought Views I can’t access the support forum).

    1) In Types, if I create a new Field with a name like ‘£’ or ‘$’ I find lots of problems with it not saving the set of fields correctly, and even those fields then appearing in Groups where I don’t want them.

    2) There is no way to delete Fields from the ‘User created fields’ block. Which gets very confusing when you’re just trying things out and end up with lots of Fields that you no longer need. Any pointers how to do this, even if in MySQL?

    Thanks for this otherwise though. Aside from inevitable early hiccups it’s looking good!

    • Thanks for reporting these. We’ll check what’s causing fields with special to not save. And, your comment about allowing to remove items from the ‘User created fields’ block is 100% correct. This bothers me too, in our own site. I’ll see how to edit that easily.

  4. Would this word with genesis child theme agentpress2.o
    Interested in integrating it with that theme and replace the agentpress listing plugin but need help on it

    • Both Types and Views have very little dependency on the theme. In our testing, we actually created a demo site with Genesis and there shouldn’t be problems with AgentPress as well.

      There might be some features that you’ll need and don’t exist. We tried to consider everything upfront, but it’s always better when people build real sites. We’ll be happy to work with you and make sure that all essential features are there.

    • The Embedded version comes together with the standard version. You don’t need to pay for it separately. You’re right about the contact page not being prominent enough. I’ll put the link in a more sensible place. Here is the contact page:
      https://toolset.com/home/contact-us/

  6. I’m looking into purchasing the Views as soon as I can because it seems this should solve all my issues for embedding game sales as posts and attaching an expiration date to that also. I hope you will still have that special going for the beta stage buyers by the beginning of next month when I’ll have enough money to buy it.

    By the way, your Video for Views still states that you can try it out for free I believe.

    Do you have a mailing list to notify potential and current customers of updates and major releases yet? If so, I’d like to be on it.

    • I didn’t see if it was possible to edit my comment while awaiting moderation but I needed to ask if there are plans for a light version with only some simple features as this plugin in it’s “Full Blown” state seems enough to satisfy even the most experienced WordPress Fanatics running huge database listings. I simply want an easier way to define custom fields and easily insert them into posts using templates.

      I did sign up for the mailing list though.

      Keep up the great work!

    • I’m glad to hear that you’re interested in Views. We’re planning to go out of Beta in about 2-3 weeks. The next release will be the last major Beta version (0.9.5). After that, we’ll only have bug-fixes and then we close Beta.

      You can subscribe to our blog:
      https://toolset.com/blog/

      We only announce product-related things.