I’ve raved about the greatness of Flutter in the past but recent versions have been a little buggy and testing them caused me a lot of wasted hours. I have no doubt that in time this excellent addition to the WP family will bear fruit but until them I’ve found 2 great alternatives.

More Fields

mf

This plugin has a really great custom field management interface. It allows you to easily create new content types such as “Reviews” or “News” that will sit alongside “Posts” and “Pages” in the WP menu.

If you feel the need you can also use this plugin to ‘switch off’ the Posts/Pages WP menu options, therefore totally re-engineering the way in which WP can be used by content authors.

Custom Field Template

cft

A somewhat simpler CMS-tool than More Fields or Flutter and unlike its counterparts the Custom Field Template plugin doesn’t have a user-friendly interface but it essentially does the same job.

The main advantage over its custom field brothers  is that Custom Field Template seems to ‘just work’. Yes its a little weird and yes most of the documentation isn’t in English but once you get past this it really is the simplest way to add new content fields to your site.

Recommendation

As ever, picking one of these tools I entirely dependant on your project. If I had to pick, and I will, the Custrom Field Template wins becuase of its pure simplicity and almost bug-less usage.

However, if you want to re-work the WP back-end further to your requirements More Fields may be more you cup of tea. Its certainly more Flutter-like.

So – until Flutter gets past BETA why wait? Both of these plugins will do a VERY good job of CMS-ing your site.