Showing the featured restaurants - Meta Box + Zion

In today’s practice, we're going to show the featured products using Meta Box and Zion.

In this case, I use the restaurants as an example of the products. This is the section I’ll create:

Video version

Preparation

All of the featured restaurants in this section are chosen manually by a custom field in the backend. Each restaurant is a post of the custom post type named Restaurants.

In addition to the basic information about the restaurant, such as the name and image as the title and featured image of the post, it may include some other information, such as the voucher, address, and logo. This extra information will be saved in separate custom fields.

Here are some tools we need for this practice:

• Meta Box core plugin: to have a framework for creating a custom post type and custom fields;
• MB Custom Post Type: create a custom post type for the restaurants;
• MB Box Builder: create custom fields to save the restaurant information;
• MB Admin Columns (optional): helps to display the custom fields as an admin column to easily see the information. I use it to show you which restaurants will be featured to easily compare with the result.
• Zion Builder: to create the featured restaurant section. You should use its pro version to make sure it runs smoothly with Meta Box.

1. Creating a new custom post type

Go to Meta Box > Post Types to create a new post type for the restaurants.

After publishing, you will see your post type displayed as a menu.

2. Creating custom fields

Go to Meta Box > Custom Fields to create fields to save extra information for the restaurants as usual.

Here are all the custom fields that I created.

Besides some familiar fields, I create a Switch field to choose whether to feature the restaurant or not.

Turning on the switch button means that the restaurant will be displayed in the section and vice versa.

I’ll also show the values of this field in the admin column to see whether the restaurant is featured or not by ticking this box. This setting is available only when you have the MB Admin Columns.

And this is how it displays on the admin dashboard.

After having all the fields, go to the Settings tab, choose Location as Post type, and select Restaurant to apply the fields to it.

In the post editor, you’ll see the created custom fields. The switch field is also displayed. You can turn on or turn off the button to choose to feature the restaurant or not.

3. Creating the section

Let’s edit the homepage with Zion Builder.

To create the section that shows the featured restaurants, add a Section element. Then, choose the Heading element and name it.

Now, add a Container element to cover the posts. You can use a Column element to easily set the layout for posts.

3.1 Setting the condition to display featured posts

In the settings of this Column element, I’ll add a condition to choose which posts will be displayed. If you don’t use the Column, you can add the condition into the Container in the same way.

Go to the Advanced tab, click on Advanced conditions to create a condition.

The condition will be based on the value of the switch field, so select the Post custom field from the list and fill in the ID of the switch field into the box.

The switch field has two statuses: On and Off, corresponding to the value 1 or 0. Since we want to display the post that has this field turned on, we put 1 into the field value box.

That’s all for the condition. It’s quite simple.

There will be multiple posts in the section, so go to the Repeater Options and turn on Enable the repeater provider.

In the Query type section, choose Query Builder. In this case, I set the Post type as Restaurant to get posts from this post type.

Remember to choose Enable repeater consumers. This is where you limit the total number of posts that will display.

You can enter numbers to the box in the image below to display only the posts in the range. For example, this is to choose to display the posts from the first to the third position. The ones from the 4th position will be disabled.

Leaving these boxes blank means that we will display all the posts that meet the condition. Otherwise, disabling the repeater consumer means that no post will be displayed.

3.2 Displaying the restaurants information

Now, we’re moving to add elements to display the restaurant information.

To display the restaurant image, add an Image element. Then, click on the Use dynamic data icon and choose Featured Image.

You see that the restaurant's images have been obtained.

For displaying the restaurant name that saves in the post title, add a Heading element, and also use dynamic data to get information from the Post Title.

To set it as clickable, in the Link section, also use dynamic data and choose the Post/ Page Link option.

Next, add a Text element for the address. Click on the Use dynamic data icon, choose Meta Box Field > choose the corresponding field. It is Address.

Do likewise to display the voucher and logo, just add a reasonable element. We also use dynamic data to get data from the right field.

We’ve displayed the wanted posts along with their information.

4. Styling the section

For styling, go back to the page editor with Zion, choose each element inside the section to change its settings. Do it one by one.

Now we have a new look of the section.