Meta Box Tutorial: How To Create Custom Post Types

In this post, you’ll learn how to easily create custom posts using the free version of the Meta Box plugin for WordPress.

Meta Box is a powerful freemium and premium plugin that lets you create custom posts, groups, meta boxes, fields, and taxonomies inside WordPress. If you’re an Oxygen Builder or Bricks Builder user, this plugin is a must. In my opinion, it’s a powerful alternative to ACF.

Let’s get started.

You can continue reading or watch the video tutorial below –

Step 1 – Install the Meta Box plugin. You can find the free version by simply navigating to Plugins > Add New and searching for Meta box.

Step 2 – Once installed and activated, open a new tab and go to the Meta Box website to download the MB Custom Post Types & Custom Taxonomies plugin. Or simply click here to access the page. Once downloaded, install and activate on your website.

Step 3 – From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Meta Box > and then go to Post Types & Taxonomies. Under create custom post types, click on Start Now. See the images below.

Step 4 – Under the General options, here you can just enter the Plural name. For example, I will use, ‘Videos‘. The singular name and slug should be the same, for example, ‘video’.

Step 5 – Under the Labels tab, I would generally leave everything here as the default.

Step 6 – Under the Advanced tab, you have some additional options, most of which you can leave as the default. That said, you may want to add an icon to appear next to your title, as well as ensure that the ‘Has archives’ box is checked.

Step 7 – Under the next tab, which is Supports, you can select the core features the post type supports. Title, editor, and thumbnail are selected by default, but you can also select some others as well, such as excerpt and author.

Step 8 – Finally under Taxonomies, you can select which taxonomy you’d like to include if you want to keep things organized. Now you can select something from the list, or create a custom taxonomy later in Meta Box. I recommend creating new ones in Meta Box to keep them separate from your main posts/page tags and categories. Then you can come back to this part and add your taxonomies.

And that is it, you’ve successfully created your custom post type. You should now see your new custom post type in the sidebar in WordPress.

What types of custom posts can you create?

Obviously, the projects custom post type is an example of one post type, but the types of pages you can create really depend on what you need for your website project – For example –

1. Vehicle sales website – Custom post type could be Vehicles, with custom meta boxes and fields such as Vehicle Make: Vehicle Model: Age: Fuel type: Mileage: Then assign the box to custom post type vehicle.
2. Holiday villa booking website – Custom post types could be Properties, with custom meta boxes and fields such as Villa name: Villa location: Sleeps: Gallery: Then assign the meta box to a custom post type property.
3. Online art gallery website – Custom post type could be Paintings, with custom meta boxes and fields such as Artist name: Medium used: Artwork size: Date Created: Then assign the met box to custom post type painting.

These are just examples, of course.

Recommended tutorials

1. How to create a custom meta box with custom fields to use in Oxygen