Please don’t use Pods

@adrian2k7 — first let me thank you for using Pods for over 7 years. I was looking for any interaction we’ve had with you over the years here on www.remarpro.com and on Slack but couldn’t find anything. Did you end up reaching out on a different account before this review?

Forgive me since I have a number of questions to follow-up on your review with. I do hope you’ll spend a little time to help give us more feedback so we can better help ensure there’s better documentation (our focus after Pods 3.0 is released).

• Which parts of WordPress or other plugins did you encounter issues with integrating Pods?
• Are you using custom post types? If so, you probably don’t need custom code there since you can almost entirely use WordPress functions unless you’re dealing with relationships that you need to query against (we don’t have a WP_Query integration for traversing relationships yet, you can only lookup IDs using that).
• Where did you encounter bad code quality? I totally understand that projects like Pods (or other plugins or WordPress itself) can grow over time and that may leave areas that need refactoring or clean up. I just want to be sure that it’s on my radar to ensure we get that addressed in a future release.
• Just an added note here that we have automated tests for much of the codebase because we support many variations of Content Types, Storage Types (meta/table), Field Types, and so many combinations of each of those. That ends up being 300+ different variations and use-cases that we cover in our automated testing. We implemented this precisely because we wanted stability to be a key focus for our codebase so that releases go smoothly and we can catch more potential bugs before they get to your site
• Updates with Pods have generally been pretty easy, what did you encounter that caused you a problem when updating? Updating Pods should generally be risk-free, but if you haven’t reached out about a problem then we might not yet know about it.
• As one of the founding developers of Pods Framework, I did not develop the Caldera Forms plugin so that part you might have misread some place. Perhaps the developer you are referring to is Josh Pollock? Josh was one of 83+ contributing developers to Pods but Josh specifically was not working on major areas of Pods code beyond the few spots they focused on with templating.

I wish you nothing but the best in your future projects, I’m sorry you had trouble with Pods. Hopefully you have some time to respond to a few items above to help clarify so we can ensure others don’t have the same challenges using Pods in the future.

Hello Scott,

Thanks for your comprehensive feedback. I really wrangled with me, before writing this feedback. I also gave 3 stars, because pods itself is okay and solves a problem. Furthermore, I also appreciate your hard work.

<tl/dr> any project pods is involved is way harder to maintain (for us). I’m not sure why, but this is my experience over the years. Maybe, because Pods is quite invasive through custom tables, relationships, custom queries … IMO, this is something, which someone should avoid by any means (I know this is hard, as WordPress is missing essential features here)

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We have 2 large pods projects and these are the hardest to maintain and migrate to newer stuff (Gutenberg related), because of a lot of pods related stuff (a lot of calls to pods(…) ) . I wasn’t the original maintainer for our large projects, just helped and eventually overtook it. Maybe we did something wrong in the beginning?

We used custom pods tables a lot and not the WordPress tables.
→ so I think this is the main reason we have to use pods over WP query i.e.

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Updates with pods… We just have this regularly, just with the last pods update, in combination with WPML. We just rolled back, as we migrate to ACF anyway.

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Yes, I was referring to Josh. I always thought he was the original author of pods too… nevertheless, working with Caldera Forms was horrible, I probably projected this to pods too…

Thanks for the feedback! It sounds like your experience with Advanced Content Types being so separate from WordPress led you to some headaches for you as you shift your content strategy.

Even if you don’t use this long, perhaps switching them to post types may assist you in your migration path? There’s a tool for that here: https://github.com/pods-framework/pods-convert

We try and give developers options and it sounds like maybe when the original work started on those projects perhaps they chose to go the long way around if you really needed things in post types.

Sorry for your experience there, I do have good news about WPML which is that we are working on a new integration that deals with the latest changes with how their plugin works. Maybe a bit late to be useful for you but I wanted to note that since you mentioned it was another problem for you recently.

If there’s anything else we can get fixed or resolved in Pods, we are happy to take any other feedback you have in the future too.

Just open wp_config.php and add

define('PODS_TABLELESS', true);

now you can use update_post_meta() without “clever” methods ??