How to Display The Latest Products - P5 - Using Meta Box and Bricks

Noticing your customers know about the latest posts or products on the homepage is a common way to increase revenue. There are various options to do it, but if you want to show not only the default information about the posts but also some further things from custom fields, let’s take a look at this tutorial. I’m going to display the latest restaurants on the homepage using Bricks.

Table of Contents hide

1. Video Version
2. Before Getting Started
3. Step 1: Create a New Custom Post Type
4. Step 2: Create Custom Fields
5. Step 3: Add a Section for the Latest Restaurants on Homepage
6. Step 4: Style the Section
7. Wind-up

Here is my example:

example for displaying the latest products in a section on the homepage using Meta Box and Bricks

Video Version

Watch this video on YouTube

Before Getting Started

In this case, my products are restaurants. Each one’s information will be saved in a post of a custom post type. The extra information such as address, logo, and voucher will be saved in custom fields.

So, to get started, we need the Meta Box core plugin to have the framework for creating custom post type and custom fields. It’s free, so you can download it directly from wordpress.org.

For the advanced features from Meta Box, we need some of its extensions:

MB Custom Post Types & Custom Taxonomies: to create custom post types;
Meta Box Builder: to have an intuitive UI to create custom fields in the backend;

They’re all in the Meta Box AIO. If you haven’t had it, you can download and install each extension individually.

Finally, make sure you’ve updated the latest version of Bricks.

Step 1: Create a New Custom Post Type

In the Admin Dashboard, go to Meta Box > Post Types > New Post Type to create a new post type for products.

Create a New Custom Post Type

After publishing, we’ll have a new menu named Restaurants in the Admin Dashboard.

a new menu display on the left sidebar

Let’s create custom fields in the following step.

Step 2: Create Custom Fields

Go to Meta Box > Custom Fields to create fields. Here is the structure of the field I created:

the custom fields that we'll create for the post type

After creating all the fields, move to the Settings tab. Remember to set the Location as Post Type, and select your product’s post type to apply these fields to it.

set location for the fields to apply them to the wanted post type

Now, when creating a new post in the Restaurant post type, the custom fields will be there.

newly created custom fields

Next, move to the next step to create a section to display the latest products on the Homepage with Bricks.

Step 3: Add a Section for the Latest Restaurants on Homepage

Let’s edit the Homepage with Bricks.

edit the Homepage with Bricks.

In the Bricks visual editor, add a Section element, then you’ll see a Container element inside it to cover all the restaurants’ information.

add a Section element

Add a Heading element to display the title of the section.

Add a Heading element to display the title of the section

In the container, add the Posts element then you will see a list of blog posts as default with featured image, title, and short description in the preview.

add the Posts element

As you know, the posts we need to show are in the Restaurants post type instead of blog posts. So, go to the Query section of the Posts element, change the Post Type to the one we want.

change the post type in the query section

Since we’re going to display the latest posts first then the oldest ones, set order posts by Published date and then choose the Descending option.

change the order by as you wanted

Next, if you want to change the page’s layout or the display of the featured image, go to the Layout and the Image section. There are several exciting options that you can choose from here.

change the layout options

change the image options

Now is the most important part of this tutorial, let’s add data from custom fields to the section to show extra information about the restaurants. Still in the Content section of the Posts element, go to the Fields and add some fields. You also can remove the field you don’t want to show here, e.g I’ll remove the post excerpt.

add fields which you created in the cusom fields

Now, just click Add Field > Dynamic Data then find the corresponding fields you want to get. The data of each post will immediately display in the preview.

data of each post will display corresponding to the fields you set

Repeat this action to get all the wanted fields. And, pay attention that when you select to get data from the logo field, it will display text as a default. For that reason, to display images, add an attribute as below:

adjust the logo field to show as picture instead of text

Now, all the data saved in custom fields has been obtained, then move to the next step to style this section.

all the data in custom fields is obtained

Remark: You should use the HTML tag for each element for easier styling them later. This is also a benefit for SEO.

use HTML class for easy styling

Step 4: Style the Section

You can easily style the layout of the section as you want in Bricks visual editor. I did it and got this look of the section.

all the information in the homepage without advance styling

For further styling, we need CSS. First, I’ll add CSS class for the Posts elements.

add CSS class for the Posts elements

Then, add some CSS code as below.

add CSS code

This is how it displays on the frontend.

the homepage is nicely styled

Wind-up

Using the Meta Box plugin and Bricks, you could follow all the steps to show the section for the latest products. Try it out and post your findings in the comments.

Consult the previous blogs in this series if you have projects utilizing a different page builder. Alternatively, feel free to post a comment if you have any tut recommendations. I appreciate your reading. Good fortune!