If you’ve spent any time at all working with WordPress themes you’ll have no doubt found yourself navigating the dark corridors of the WordPress Template Hierarchy.

It took some time for me to get my head around which file to create when I’m making custom templates and the WordPress Codex has been invaluable in terms of figuring out what to put where.  The Codex’s diagram and my handy dandy little template code snippet that prints out which template I’m looking (below) at have been my ‘go to’ resources.

I came across a couple of alternatives today that I love!!  Thought you’d like to check them out too…

I was approached by a client recently who wanted a solution to display captured data on their website in the kind of way you’d need to do if you were creating an online petition and wanted to display signatories. In this case the client is creating a pledge form and simply wanted to create a page that lists the names of the pledgers, their age, city, state and country.

I googled around to find a solution and in the course of all of that I discovered that you could use Gravity Forms (and a handy dandy plugin) to create Custom Post Type entries. In its simplest setting, you create a form on your page and map the form so that it creates the post entries that we can then display in an archive template which regurgitates the relevant data and displays it in a list. It seems like the kind of thing other people might be interested in doing as well… here’s how I pulled it off.