We are going to be having our first Central Arkansas Refresh meeting of the new year on Tuesday, January 26th at the Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock.  The #RefreshCA group is a group of web developers, bloggers, IT people, and agency personnel that gathers on the last Tuesday of each month to discuss topics of interest within our industry. 

This month Nick Brewer from CJRW is going to be presenting on Pods CMS for Wordpress.  For those of you not familiar w/ Pods CMS, it’s a CMS framework that sits on top of Wordpress, allowing you to add and display your own content types.  Here’s a brief description:

As it is defined, Pods is a content management plugin for WordPress. Many people may wonder why a plugin is needed to make WordPress a content management system, doesn’t it do that already? Absolutely, but out of the box, WordPress specifically caters to a few types of content; Posts, Pages, Media, Comments, and Links. WordPress does a ton more (such as categories, tags, users, etc.), but as far as the average user is concerned, those are the major content types you’re able to work with. Themes bring all that managed content together to share with the world, and plugins build on top of that even more.

Many plugins exist to provide you with a new type of content to manage, most often a specific type of content aimed at achieving a specific goal. That’s awesome, and helps tons of people to make that change they’re looking to update on their site. Pods, however, thinks about things in a different way.

Pods provides a platform on which to build your own content types to manage, all the while providing some really advanced functionality having to do with that content. From the User Guide, a Pod is a group of input fields. You can add and arrange any number of the various available input fields to any number of Pods, essentially creating your own custom CMS for each website you build in WordPress.

The meeting should get started around 6pm and is open to the public.  We meet in the basement area of the saucer, just walk into the bar area and then take the stairway down to the basement.  For more information about the Central Arkansas Refresh Group, please visit our website: http://refreshcentralarkansas.org or join our group on Facebook.  You may also follow the group on Twitter at @RefreshCA.

For directions to the Flying Saucer, see the map below:

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