Structured Data for Easy Management

Post types

Like all content managers, WordPress let you create various types of content, to make editing easier. This can be achieved through plugins or through custom code in your theme. With TheDock, you get a visual interface to create Post types and assign templates to be used when accessing the index of that post type (the archive in WordPress terminology) or a single piece of content.

Dynamic data

When creating layouts in TheDock, you can assign dynamic data sources to your blocks. Different blocks need different sources, it can be plain text, rich text or a set of images. When assigning a block to be dynamic and publishing your theme the appropriate source input will appear when editing that type of content in WordPress.

By keeping the content of your website organized by type, it is easy to make changes in the presentation of that data without make any changes to your content. An organized database is also easier to extend when needed, for instance if you wish to make certain pieces of content available using the WordPress REST API.

Templating

When you have created your post type and the associated data fields, you can use the data in your layout. This way your layouts become dynamic templates in your WordPress theme.

A key concept of WordPress is “The loop”, which is basically a database query returning one or more posts matching the criteria you specify. By using the loop you can display a list of items from your database in any way you like. Each item will then display data from its own dataset, based on the fields you have specified.

Easy Content Management

Using well structured datasets in combination with post types makes the WordPress editing experience very intuitive.

An editor can then easily create new entries with the correct data and items will display correctly based on the template created in TheDock’s Layout builder.