I’ve raved about the greatness of Flutter in the past but recent versions have been a little buggy and testing them caused me a lot of wasted hours. I have no doubt that in time this excellent addition to the WP family will bear fruit but until them I’ve found 2 great alternatives.
More Fields
This plugin has a really great custom field management interface. It allows you to easily create new content types such as “Reviews” or “News” that will sit alongside “Posts” and “Pages” in the WP menu.
If you feel the need you can also use this plugin to ‘switch off’ the Posts/Pages WP menu options, therefore totally re-engineering the way in which WP can be used by content authors.
Custom Field Template
A somewhat simpler CMS-tool than More Fields or Flutter and unlike its counterparts the Custom Field Template plugin doesn’t have a user-friendly interface but it essentially does the same job.
The main advantage over its custom field brothers is that Custom Field Template seems to ‘just work’. Yes its a little weird and yes most of the documentation isn’t in English but once you get past this it really is the simplest way to add new content fields to your site.
Recommendation
As ever, picking one of these tools I entirely dependant on your project. If I had to pick, and I will, the Custrom Field Template wins becuase of its pure simplicity and almost bug-less usage.
However, if you want to re-work the WP back-end further to your requirements More Fields may be more you cup of tea. Its certainly more Flutter-like.
So – until Flutter gets past BETA why wait? Both of these plugins will do a VERY good job of CMS-ing your site.
I’ve tried flutter & CWP (way back in the past) and recently: MF & CFT, and arrived in the crossroad between which to choose.
seems flutter is built on the CWP code.
MF & CFT are good, but the main headache I have is the bug (?) that caused the posts in the specific post-type I wrote in the past isn’t appearing in the manage post-type panel. eg: I created “Event” post-type and I published “Celebration” under Event, then I go to the Manage Event panel, the Celebration is just not there.
looking forward for the stable version of the plugins,
I looked at the developer page, it seems that CFT constantly releasing a new version of the plugin but I can hardly see the community discussion but in the comments of http://wordpressgogo.com/development/custom-field-template.html
MF is having its own support forum http://labs.dagensskiva.com/forum/forum.php?id=1 — but it seems the discussions run a bit slow
flutter, have a nice support too http://flutter.freshout.us/support/ but looking at the submitted bug page, I’m so in doubt if this will run smoothly.
which one do you use and what problems have you experienced? 🙂
Very impressive. I’m using Flutter, but it has some bug with WYSIWYG editor, the paragraph tags are not shown as they have to, and when I create a custom field with multiple-line textbox, it conflicts with the default editor.
I will try to use 2 above plugins for alternative. Thank you very much for this information.
Hey – came across this post looking for a solution to the same issue as Hon tap – that is, flutter isn’t showing paragraphs in the multiline editor.
If anyone happens to hear of a solution for that, please let me know!
I wholeheartedly agree with this post. After testing Flutter, More Fields, and CFT I ended up going with CFT. I wish these guys would just all get together and make a premium plugin or something.