WordPress, you know it… you love it. But a big part of what makes WordPress so awesome is it’s ecosystem of passionate users, theme and plugin developers. In the case of theme and plugin developers, they’re essential to making it easy on the rest of us to get WordPress to do the things we want it to with relatively little effort and cost.

While it’s impressive how many add-on’s are available for the WordPress platform for free, the reality is that everything comes at a price. Usually it’s the developers time, but it can also come at a price to the community. When a theme or plugin we rely on crosses a certain threshold of complexity and need for support, it can become difficult or even impossible for the developer to keep up with; and when they can’t we all loose.

Pods CMS – WordPress Plugin

I make a considerable portion of my living from WordPress work and know its themes, frameworks and plugins well. One of the most amazing plugins built for WordPress is Pods CMS built by Scott Clark. Pods serves to extend WordPress’ CMS functionality and take it to the next level. So as WordPress usage grows and we continue to push it into new places, the need for the functionality that Pods provides becomes ever more important.

Pods is not a lightweight plugin and is probably best served in the hands of an experienced developer to get it to do what you want, but if you’ve ever heard someone say “WordPress” can’t do that, think again, it can, and there is a good chance Pods can help it get there.

One of the more interesting examples of Pods capabilities is the scheduling system Scott and Matthew built for OpenCamp 2010. It’s all Pods! But Pods doesn’t stop there, when you look at the Pods showcase and get a sense of the companies that use it you’ll want to explore the ways it can work for you.

Pods 2.0 

Because of it’s complexity, the development effort has grown to a point where it needs a little help. Pods 2.0 is about to come out with a major overhaul of the UI (and much more) and we want to help Scott push it over the finish line.

In order to wrap up 2.0 over the next couple of weeks, Scott has made Pods a Kickstarter project to raise funds so he can focus exclusively on finishing it up.

If I had my way we would raise so much money that Scott would never have to do anything again but keep developing and supporting this amazing plugin. If you’ve not used Pods, be sure to check it out at PodsCMS.org. If you have benefitted from Pods then I would encourage you to step up and make a donation to push 2.0 over the finish line.

If you have a project that’s used Pods leave us a comment and link below, we would love to see and hear what you’ve done with it.