Tran Ngoc Tuan Anh

Meta Box

truongwp

Doan Ngoc Anh

hsimah

<p><strong>MB Relationships</strong> helps you create relationships between posts, pages, custom post type, terms and users. The plugin is lightweight and optimized for database and query performance.</p>
<p>The plugin allows you to create connections from posts to posts, posts to pages and so on. Then you can perform corresponding queries to retrieve posts that are connected to or from given posts.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Meta Box Lite</strong><br />
  We recommend using <a href="https://metabox.io/lite/" rel="nofollow ugc">Meta Box Lite</a>, a feature-rich free UI version of Meta Box that provides UI and all free features for managing custom fields and dynamic content on WordPress, including post types, taxonomies, custom fields, and relationships.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It supports reciprocal and bi-directional relationships.</p>
<h3>Why Do You Need Posts To Posts Relationships In WordPress?</h3>
<p>Post relationships is a missing part in WordPress. The only “built-in” way that mimic the post relationship in WordPress is the <code>post_parent</code> for pages where you can create many child pages of a page (a one-to-many relationship). Unfortunately, that’s available for pages and hierarchical post types only. Besides, it’s not many-to-many relationship.</p>
<p>Below are some examples of posts to posts relationships that might help you see the benefit of this feature:</p>
<h4>Creating Related Posts In WordPress</h4>
<p>The simplest example is to manually create related posts in your WordPress website. When you edit a post, you can select posts that have similar or related content and display them in the frontend for further reading.</p>
<p>You can also query backward: displaying posts that link to the being read post as a reference to provide more information to your readers. With this, you don’t need a WordPress related posts plugin anymore.</p>
<h4>Example: Events And Bands</h4>
<p>Suppose you have two custom post types, event and band, where:</p>
<ul>
<li>In each event there may be multiple bands, and</li>
<li>Each band can participate in many events.</li>
</ul>
<p>If people want to buy tickets, they could search for events in their location and see what bands are playing on a given date, or they could search for bands they like and see what date they are playing near their location.</p>
<p>In this example, we have created many-to-many relationships between events and bands.</p>
<h3>Bi-directional relationships</h3>
<p><strong>MB Relationships</strong> allows you to create bi-directional connections. You will be able to query back and forth without any problem.</p>
<p>The data is stored in the database as a pair of (from_id, to_id), thus making it independent from either side.</p>
<p>Besides, for each side, there’s a meta box that shows what are connected from/to. So you don’t have to worry about the direction of the connection anymore.</p>
<h3>An Alternative For The Posts 2 Posts Plugin (P2P Plugin)</h3>
<p><strong>MB Relationships</strong> is very much inspired by the popular plugin <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/posts-to-posts/" rel="ugc">Posts 2 Posts</a> which is not maintained anymore. We have taken the idea and made some improvements. The codebase and data structure is very similar.</p>
<h3>Plugin features</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Simple APIs</strong>: the plugin provides simple APIs for registering relationships and retrieving connected items. It integrates with existing WordPress APIs such as <code>WP_Query</code>,<code>get_terms</code> and <code>get_users</code>. See <a href="https://docs.metabox.io/extensions/mb-relationships/" rel="nofollow ugc">documentation</a> for more information.</li>
<li>Uses <strong>custom relationship table</strong> to store relationships. That helps optimize the database storage and query performance.</li>
<li>You can <strong>create relationships between any kind of content</strong> in WordPress: posts to posts, posts to users, etc. For posts to terms and posts to users, it’s required the <a href="https://metabox.io/plugins/mb-term-meta/" rel="nofollow ugc">MB Term Meta</a> and <a href="https://metabox.io/plugins/mb-user-meta/" rel="nofollow ugc">MB User Meta</a>.</li>
<li>Supports creating <strong>reciprocal relationships</strong> (posts-posts, users-users, …).</li>
<li>Supports creating <strong>bi-directional relationships</strong> and easily query them.</li>
<li>Display connected items easily with <strong>shortcode</strong>.</li>
<li>Extremely <strong>lightweight and fast</strong>.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Plugin Links</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://metabox.io/plugins/mb-relationships/" rel="nofollow ugc">Project Page</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/wpmetabox/mb-relationships/" rel="nofollow ugc">Github Repo</a></li>
</ul>
<p>This plugin is a free extension of <a href="https://metabox.io" rel="nofollow ugc">Meta Box</a> plugin, which is a powerful, professional solution to create custom fields and custom meta boxes for WordPress websites. Using <strong>MB Relationships</strong> in combination with <a href="https://metabox.io/plugins/" rel="nofollow ugc">other extensions</a> will help you manage any content types in WordPress easily and make your website more professional.</p>
<h3>You might also like</h3>
<p>If you like this plugin, you might also like our other WordPress products:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://metabox.io" rel="nofollow ugc">Meta Box</a> – A powerful WordPress plugin for creating custom post types and custom fields.</li>
<li><a href="https://wpslimseo.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Slim SEO</a> – A fast, lightweight and full-featured SEO plugin for WordPress with minimal configuration.</li>
<li><a href="https://wpslimseo.com/products/slim-seo-schema/" rel="nofollow ugc">Slim SEO Schema</a> – An advanced, powerful and flexible plugin to add schemas to WordPress.</li>
<li><a href="https://wpslimseo.com/products/slim-seo-link-manager/" rel="nofollow ugc">Slim SEO Link Manager</a> – Build internal link easier in WordPress with real-time reports.</li>
<li><a href="https://gretathemes.com" rel="nofollow ugc">GretaThemes</a> – Free and premium WordPress themes that clean, simple and just work.</li>
<li><a href="https://wpautolistings.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Auto Listings</a> – A car sale and dealership plugin for WordPress.</li>
</ul>


MB Relationships

👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

This makes many-to-many so easy

A lightweight solution for creating relationships between posts, terms and users in WordPress.

Ross Wintle

<p>This plugin provides a library for developers to use to create AJAX-powered drop-down post select boxes.</p>
<p>This is best explained with an example. Say you have a plugin or theme that sets up a custom post type called “Resources”.  You want users to be able to manually create, for each post, “Related posts” and “Related resources” using meta boxes with data (the IDs of the related posts/resources) saved to custom fields.</p>
<p>One way to do this is to use a select box. This would be a big long list of ALL the posts or resources on your site. This is not very user friendly, but also, with a large number of posts and resources to list, can be a real performance hog. I’ve even had this approach blow the PHP memory_limit and break the admin of sites.</p>
<p>This plugin improves both the user experience and performance of creating selectable post lists by enhancing them with the functionality of AJAX-powered <a href="https://github.com/select2/select2" rel="nofollow ugc">Select2</a> select boxes.</p>
<p>The plugin:</p>
<ul>
<li>gives a simple way to select posts from a specified post type based on a partial, case-insensitive title search</li>
<li>saves selected post IDs to custom post meta variables</li>
<li>requires minimal coding (but, sadly, does require some coding in your plugin or theme)</li>
</ul>
<p>Select2 is MIT Licensed and Copyright (c) 2012-2015 Kevin Brown, Igor Vaynberg, and Select2 contributors,</p>
<h3>Configuration</h3>
<p>This plugin provides a library for you to use in Themes and Plugins that you create.  To use it you will need to add some code to your plugin or theme. Not much, but you will need to add some.</p>
<p>The basic steps are:</p>
<ol>
<li>initialise the post selectors</li>
<li>create a meta box that displays on your custom post type’s edit page</li>
<li>populate the meta box with the post selectors</li>
<li>getting your data out</li>
</ol>
<p><em>Note: all code here is prefixed with ‘demo</em>‘ – please change this to an appropriate prefix for your own project or put the calls in a wrapper class or namespace of some sort._</p>
<h3>Initialise Post Selectors</h3>
<p>You should initialise the Post Selectors on admin_init – they aren’t required in the front end.</p>
<p>You should call S2PS_Post_Select::create() for each post selector that you want to create.</p>
<p>The parameters to the create method are:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>$field_id</code> – this is the ‘name’ of the field – used to identify it for printing or saving – it must be unique for your post selector</li>
<li><code>$meta_key</code> – the meta_key to fetch/save data to/from</li>
<li><code>$form_field_name</code> – the name attribute of the select form field to be created</li>
<li><code>$form_field_label</code> – the label text for the select form field</li>
<li><code>$post_post_type</code> – the post type of the posts which we want the select box to appear for</li>
<li><code>$item_post_type</code> – the post type of the things to appear in the select list</li>
<li><code>$additional_query_params</code> – any additional query params for generating the list (if you want to filter what appears in the selector); this is an array of parameters that you would pass to <code>WP_Query</code> – you can pass pretty much anything, I think, except post_type. Using things like pagination parameters probably isn’t recommended.</li>
</ul>
<p>The first parameter, <code>$field_id</code>, is needed when adding the code to display the post selector, so remember what they are.</p>
<p>Here’s some code that initialises “Related posts” and “Related resources” (of “resources” custom post type) to be displayed on the edit screen of posts.</p>
<pre><code>add_action('admin_init', 'demo_create_post_selects');
function demo_create_post_selects() {
    S2PS_Post_Select::create( 'related-articles', 'related-articles', 'demo_related_articles', 'Related articles', 'post', 'post');
    S2PS_Post_Select::create( 'related-resources', 'related-resources', 'demo_related_resources', 'Related resources', 'post', 'resources' );
}
</code></pre>
<h3>Create meta boxes</h3>
<p>This just uses a standard WordPress add_meta_box call to add a meta box to the post type that you want to display the selectors in.  The callback to print the content of the meta box (<code>demo_print_related_items_meta_box</code>) will use the code in the next section to display the post selectors.</p>
<pre><code>add_action('add_meta_boxes', 'demo_add_related_items_meta_box');
function demo_add_related_items_meta_box() {
    add_meta_box( 'related_items', 'Related Items', 'demo_print_related_items_meta_box', 'post', 'normal',
         'default' );
}
</code></pre>
<h3>Add post selectors to meta boxes</h3>
<p>This is the callback that is called to display the contents of the meta box.  Here we need out <code>$field_id</code>‘s from the first section of code.</p>
<pre><code>function demo_print_related_items_meta_box( $post ) {
    S2PS_Post_Select::display( 'related-articles' );
    S2PS_Post_Select::display( 'related-resources' );
}
</code></pre>
<h3>Getting data out</h3>
<p>Data is stored as regular post meta, so you can retrieve it with <code>get_post_meta()</code> calls (or other functions that get post meta for you).</p>
<p>One important thing to note is that if multiple posts are selected in a given field then these are stored as multiple post meta entries with the same key.  So, when you call <code>get_post_meta()</code>, ensure that the <code>$single</code> parameter is set to <code>false</code> (it is by default).</p>


Select 2 Post Selector

I was in urgent need of understanding Select2 for my own projects.  The really clear code in this plugin made it a breeze to clone what I needed.
Thanks!!!!



Great Job, you rock!

Provides developers with a simple means of creating AJAX-powered Select 2 post select meta boxes

MB Relationships vs Select 2 Post Selector