Rob Barrett

WordPress Pods: Properly formatted output from ‘desc’ fields

Posted on September 15, 2009 at 1:58pm

A few months ago, I discovered the Pods plugin for WordPress, and it’s completely changed the way I go about building many projects. It essentially adds CMS functionality to WordPress, allowing you to create your own input modules and display them however you want. The Pods website homepage has a video that explains the plugin much better than I do.

It’s a new project though, and there’s not a whole lot of documentation for it at the moment, so it’s handy when users find solutions to common problems and share them.

In that vein, I’ve been having a problem in that the default WYSIWYG editor for textfields in Pods outputs text with multiple line breaks between paragraphs, rather than just creating new paragraphs as I want.

By adding this Display Helper to a field, the helper searches the field content for any reference of ‘<br>’ or ‘<br />’ and replaces it with ‘\n’ (just a new line, as if someone had pressed Return). Then the wpautop function from WordPress looks for any block of text surrounded by double-new-lines and adds the correct block-level tag around it, such as ‘<p>’.

Here is the Display Helper code:

<?php
$value = str_replace(array('<br />', '<br>'), "\n", $value);
echo wpautop($value); ?>

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