wp-admin-utility installs as a plugin and provides an API for quickly setting up custom post types and options pages. Whereas other post type builders provide an admin interface for creating post types, this utility reads static configuration files to create post types via a declarative syntax.

composer require dwalkr/wp-admin-utility

The PageCreator singleton is used to parse configuration files. It is made available on a custom hook named adminutility-pagecreator-init. The hook is triggered on after_setup_theme, so just be sure you add your callback before that event (plugins can use plugins_loaded and themes can just put their code directly in functions.php.)

Use the addPostType method to create post types, and addSettingsPage to create options pages.

<?php

add_action('adminutility-pagecreator-init', function($pageCreator){
  $pageCreator->addPostType('/path/to/config.yml');
});

Configuration files can be in yaml, json, or php format. When passing a PHP file to PageCreator, the file should return the configuration as an associative array.

Instead of having PageCreator parse a configuration file, you can pass an array or PHP object containing the configuration instead of the path to a file. Use the FROM_ARRAY and FROM_OBJECT constants to tell PageCreator how to process the first method parameter.

<?php

$config = [
  'active' => true,
  'name' => 'specials',
  'public' => true
  //...
];
$pageCreator->addPostType($config, \dwalkr\WPAdminUtility\PageCreator::FROM_ARRAY);

Almost all options that can be passed into the register_post_type function can be added to the top-level config for a post type.

To understand how to set up meta boxes with custom fields, see the post type example.

To understand how to set up settings pages, see the settings page example.

To add a custom fields and meta boxes to an existing post type, just add a configuration file with the name property matching the existing post type. If the post type has already been registered, the rest of the top-level configuration is ignored and only metaboxes are added.