The Culture Object Display plugin (or “COD” in short) is a separate plugin to the main Culture Object one. As of writing (8th August 2025), the plugin is in an alpha state, which means it is not available to install from the official WordPress plugin directory yet. We are working on this and hope to have a public release available soon.
You can get the display plugin from GitHub – there are no releases yet so just download as zip, and install by uploading to your WordPress site.
If you’re using the Museum Data Service as your data source, please see the MDS specific COD display plugin which you’ll find here.
With any software, and particularly with pre-release software, we stress again: do not use this plugin on a production site! Please test on local, staging or non-public sites first – we are not responsible for data loss or other issues so please take this warning seriously!
What COD does
If you’re not familiar with WordPress theme development then COD gives you a way of displaying CultureObject content on your site. It’s easy to install and use – but it also comes with limitations.
The two most obvious of these limitations are:
- With some providers (particularly the Museum Data Service (MDS) or other structured data sources) we map specific data to specific WordPress fields. So although our MDS import actually does include all your data, you can’t get at non-mapped fields using COD – for that you’ll need to get your hands dirty and do some theming!
- With COD you can’t do any sort of logic with fields – so for instance in a real world example you might want to say “If person name doesn’t exist then show person2 name“. This isn’t possible with COD, and again will require you to get into theming.
In brief: we’d always suggest you “do this properly” using proper theme development approaches as you get much more flexibility – but if all you need is something simple to install and use, COD may do it for you!
With these caveats in mind…
How to use Culture Object Display
1. Make sure you’ve got the CultureObject Display Plugin installed and activated. You should see a menu item under CultureObject called “Display Settings” if so. You should also have already imported your data using the standard Culture Object plugin.
2. Go to the Display Settings page. Here you will see two rich-text (WYSIWYG) boxes – at the top is the “Archive and Search Results Content” box. This one determines what you see next to each item in the archive / list view of your records.
If you now click “Add Culture Object Field” above either of the boxes, you’ll see a dropdown showing the available fields. Here’s an example from a MDS import:
Choose one (preferably one that is populated in your particular dataset!) and choose Add Field Value. Some text should appear in the WYSIWYG corresponding to the item you chose. Try adding just one field, then clicking save.
If you’re familiar with mail merges in Microsoft Word… this is pretty much what we’re doing here! Those {{ cos.field_value.whatever }} fields are essentially placeholders which get replaced with real data when the page in question is displayed.
For the sake of experimentation, add the field in the “Archive and Search Results Content” box:
Now go to yoursite.com/object/ and refresh. You should see that the field that you added underneath the title of each object in the listing.
You probably know this already but if you get a “404 not found” message, go to Settings > Permalinks and save – don’t change any options! – just save. Then try looking at yousite.com/object/ again…
3. The “Single Object Content” is the output that you see on yousite.com/object/{identifier} – and it works in exactly the same way. Just choose the field(s) you want to display, add some simple formatting if you need, and click save.
Now if you navigate to a single record on your site you should see the placeholders have been replaced with the record values:
Note that you can also add the field names using the editors above – just click the button to “Add Field Name” on the GUI.
If your data source is MDS, see this page for a quick, downloadable snippet that you can paste into your single record COD settings page to show all MDS mapped fields.