Required Plugins

[BenBish]

Hi there is no mention of the required plugins in the docs yet when you activate the plugin they are listed as such.

Are they merely recommended? Keen to hear your thoughts and thanks for a really good starter compass theme.

[mattbanks]

Sorry for not having that in the readme - I'll add it in the next couple days once I have a chance. The plugins I have set to required are ones I use for most sites I build and I don't want clients turning them off accidentally or otherwise, so I use a required plugin class from Thomas Griffin and Gary Jones.

Feel free to change them, add new ones, etc in your one development environment - all the code for requiring plugins is in lib/theme-require-plugins.php

[BenBish]

OK that's great. TGM looks really useful too, I will edit as required.

Just to be crystal clear, with your starter theme, out of the box, there is no literal requirement for any of those plugins though? They are just the ones that you always end up using?

I haven't come across Pods before installing your theme. In the past I've created my own content types in functions in conjunction with the excellent ACF http://www.advancedcustomfields.com for custom fields. Off topic but you would recommend Pods to replace that functionality?

[mattbanks]

Just to be crystal clear, with your starter theme, out of the box, there is no literal requirement for any of those plugins though? They are just the ones that you always end up using?

Correct - there aren't any plugins required to use this theme.

I haven't come across Pods before installing your theme. In the past I've created my own content types in functions in conjunction with the excellent ACF http://www.advancedcustomfields.com for custom fields. Off topic but you would recommend Pods to replace that functionality?

I prefer Pods because it gives an all-in-one package for custom post types, taxonomies, custom fields, etc. It's extremely robust, the developer is amazing, and he's always adding new features. ACF is great and I use that here and there (as well as Custom Field Suite), but most of the time I go with Pods. The only downside to Pods at the moment is that it doesn't support repeatable fields and field groups, but it's coming in version 2.4.

[BenBish]

Awesome, thanks Matt.