Integration Between Toolset and Visual Composer Helps Build Sites with Custom Fields

Two popular plugins, Visual Composer and Toolset, just got integrated, opening new possibilities for WordPress development.

Designers love Visual Composer because it makes it easy to edit content. Visual Composer allows you to build fancy pages, without spending time on complex HTML or CSS. But for many sites, simple “pages” are not enough. In fact, over 30% of all WordPress sites rely on custom types and fields. Toolset plugins help close this gap and allow to design templates with Visual Composer and display fields that come from the WordPress admin (WP Mayor readers can get an exclusive 20% discount when they purchase Toolset).

The ideal workflow – editing content with custom fields, displaying with templates

When you’re developing a site, you’re probably already thinking about the person who will run it. Your client. The client may have basic WordPress background, but you don’t want him touching HTML and editing your design. You want your client to “just edit content”. For this, using custom types and fields is the ideal solution.

Let’s say that you’re developing a real estate site. You set up a CPT for houses and this CPT has many fields. When the client needs to add a house, he goes to Houses, clicks on Add new and fills in fields. That client doesn’t need to worry about how the house appears on the front-end, only about entering the right value in the right field.

When editing houses like this, the user cannot break anything.

Once a house is saved, it displays correctly on the front-end. This is the purpose of the template.

But this is probably not new to you. Everyone who builds WordPress sites knows that they need to design templates to display custom fields.

Developing templates without writing PHP, using Visual Composer and Toolset

What this new integration between Visual Composer and Toolset gives you is the ability to design custom templates, in minutes, with your favorite editor.

Until now, you could design individual pages with Visual Composer. But there was no way to include fields in VC designs and save these designs as templates.

With Toolset, start by creating a new template, right from within the WordPress admin.

Then, you open VC and create the design. You work normally, except the fact that you’re not designing a specific page, but a template. So, instead of inserting texts and images, you insert fields to the design.

This video shows the entire process of designing a template with Visual Composer and Toolset:

The template may look odd in the backend, because all you see are placeholders for fields. When you look at the front-end, you will see each of the houses, displaying with your design.

So now, your client can use the WordPress admin and edit content with fields and everything displays with your VC design.

Templates are just the tip of the iceberg

Toolset is a complete suite for developing custom functionality without writing in PHP. You can Toolset and try it for 30 days.

Try Toolset

We’ve teamed up with the team behind Toolset, the page builder which lets you build WordPress sites without coding, to offer you an exclusive 20% discount.

20% Discount