Today we are releasing another maintenance release for the 2.x branch, Pods 2.5.5. This particular release, in addition to fixing some cosmetic items related to autocomplete relationships in the admin, includes a very requested bugfix & feature enhancement for Pods Templates. We’ve had several requests that the [each][/each] template tags (described in detail in ‘Using Template Tags’) don’t work with Taxonomy on post-types. You could always get the list of Categories or Taxonomies against a post by using the magic tag {@categories} , but if you wanted control over that output in your Pods Templates, you had to resort to an output filter or some other method. This patch allows you [each] and loop through them just like any other relationship to the post.

We updated to the latest Glotpress Grunt module which fixed our translations update process during the release and build script. This resolves some issues that were being caused by the last couple of releases where the .mo files weren’t pulling down correctly for different translations to show in the admin area.

We’re also using this patch to incorporate the Pods Frontier Auto Template plugin functionality directly into the Pods Templates Component. Now when you activate Pods Templates under Pods Admin, Components, Templates, you will get a new menu item under Edit Pods for “Auto Template Options”. This provides the same functionality as the Pods Frontier Auto Template plugin with the added benefit of having the Pods Templates selectable in a drop-down instead of having to type them into the admin screen. If you need to learn more about using Pods Templates to Display your Pods, check out the PodsCast where we discuss using them for displaying data in your theme and in the Video Tutorial Series by OSTraining.

State of the Pods

CMB2 integration is moving along very nicely, Phil Lewis (@pglewis13) has spent extensive time on refactoring the PHP code for CMB2 group fields to better support what we’re calling “nested fields”, which will allow group fields to contain group fields inside them and so on. Phil will continue onto other CMB2 integration tasks like reconciling our Field Type options with CMB2 Field Types.

Micah Wood (@wpscholar) has been diving into the Backbone and JS that power CMB2 forms with the aim to refactor everything there to support the new “nested fields” we’ve added the ability to use in the PHP. He’ll continue working more on this throughout the month.

Friends of Pods has been going well, we had a few more people join the past few weeks, more stats below.

Friends of Pods Transparency Report

We’ve had lots of help from our Friends of Pods over the past few months since we’ve had the program active. Here’s some stats on where we’re at and our goals for the year.

Active Recurring Friends and Pillar Sponsors: 22

Monthly USD from Friends of Pods recurring: $4,285

Current monthly operational costs for team: $6,600

Peek monthly operational costs for team to date (2015): $7,400

Now some stats on how we’re doing for the year:

Friends of Pods revenue including one-time donations to date (2015): $38,400

Friends of Pods for end-of-year 2015 (with current active friends): $51,255

Operational costs to date (2015): $65,000+

Operational costs for end-of-year (2015): $85,000+

OpenHub.net has some cool info to say about our project cost overall, excluding Pods 1.x and excluding any external dependencies we use for CSS/JS/PHP:

You’ll probably notice that our costs are far greater than our Friends of Pods recurring revenues. With that shortfall, Phil Lewis (@pglewis13) and Jim True (@jimtrue) provide services and consulting to various companies and individuals throughout the year in the name of Pods. The payments for that work are then directed towards Pods as one-time invoice payments (excluded from the list above). This is sub-optimal and isn’t exactly sustainable long-term. This extra work takes away from core work on Pods itself.

We’re doing our best to drum up additional support, and we’re hoping that through our work on CMB2 we may gain additional friends and sponsors through the next few months. I have personally invested a great deal of time and money into ensuring CMB2 integration and Pods 3.0 remain our focus through the end of the year. We have no current plans to put Phil or Jim on additional service/consulting projects so the Pods team can focus on getting you the features you’ve been waiting for.

Join us in reaching our goal for the year, become a Friend of Pods or read more how to help out below.

How to Get Involved

Are you a developer? Want to help make Pods 3.0? Ping us in our Slack #dev-core chat channel and we can get you into some areas we could use some help on.

If you’re a CMB2 fanatic, join in with our Pods 3.0 integration with CMB2 work in our Slack #dev-core-cmb2 channel, there’s plenty of things you can contribute to there as well. You can also join the official CMB2 Gitter and follow our GitHub repo specific to CMB2.

Or if you want to just help Pods 3.0 happen more quickly, help continue to fund our development team’s time by becoming a Friend of Pods or by making a one-time donation. If your company would prefer to have an invoice for any one-time or recurring donation, please let Jim True (@jimtrue) know and he’ll get that sorted out for you.