You want to get values of Meta Box fields and put them on your front-end templates, but you're not too familiar with coding and don't want to touch theme files?
Meet MB Views!
MB Views is an extension for Meta Box, which helps you to get Meta Box fields and build your templates on the front end fast and easily.
With MB Views, you can just select fields you want to show, fill in some parameters, and done! The extension supports all custom fields built with Meta Box, and also post fields (such as post title and post content), site settings, user fields, and even query fields.
You can also customize all templates in WordPress, even for post types that don't have Meta Box fields.
See the video below to know how to use MB Views to design your singular and archive templates in WordPress.
Powerful Template Editors
MB Views allows you to write any HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for your templates. So you have full control of what will be outputted on the front end, and thus, you can optimize the output the way you want (for a better semantic or better performance).
That means you no longer have multiple nested "div" like you used to have when using a page builder plugin! And your score on Google PageSpeed Insights will be higher.
By separating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (each of them will have a separated editor with syntax highlighting), you can separate the output and styling, which helps you organize the views better.
Besides, MB Views supports shortcodes!
One-Click To Insert Fields
Whenever you need to insert a Meta Box field, post field, or user field, you can easily do that with a single click.
You can choose which fields you want to insert from the Insert Fields panel on the right. And the plugin supports cloneable groups as well as settings fields and custom user fields.
And for each field, depending on its type, there will be some additional options for the output. All you need to do is just select them and insert them into the template editor.
Twig support
Imagine when you want to show a HTML section only when a Meta Box field has value? Or do you want to display a specific image when a post doesn't have a featured image? Of course, that can't be done with HTML.
With Twig, the problem is solved easily! Twig is the most popular template engine for PHP, which is flexible and fast.
Integrating Twig in MB Views, you're now able to write conditions (if..else), control structures (for loop) and use a lot of useful filters to format the output.
This is a simple example that uses Twig to output values of a cloneable group:
Powerful Location Rules
MB Views has a powerful location system that allows you to set where to show views. E.g. you can set a view to show on a single post type template, or for only posts in a specific category. You can also combine multiple conditions to create your own logic rules.
So, you can build a view for:
- Singular post type page
- Post type archive page
- Posts that are in a specific category and/or has a specific tag
- Homepage
- A landing page
or any page you want.
Build Your Templates, Not Just Content
And you can set MB Views to render the rule for the whole layout or only render for the post content area. That means you have full control of the layout output and thus, you can customize it better.
With the connection with object fields and query fields, you can get all posts and output your posts as a grid or list in an archive page. Or output post title, content, and comments in a singular page template.
Read our specific guide for MB Views here.
This opens a lot of possibilities to redesign your website without touching or changing your theme files!
Or maybe you can forget your theme now!