It is clear that I need the abillity to display and index all or a lot of the custom posts of a certain type. I’m guessing that multiple options can do that – it is just the same as outputting a different select result on posts with some query parameters. But I would obviously look for that feature rather than something that needed to be hand-specified.

Maybe u meant that if they show examples with making lists of pictures they are probably outputting lists of <div> & that is promising in the sense that it can be styled any which way on the back end? Those plugin descriptions aren’t very comprehensive so that’s a thing basis. I guess I’ll just try and play with it a bit.

Pods is looking pretty capable. One feature of note – all custom field values can go straight into HTML: http://pods.io/docs/build/using-magic-tags/

I installed the Zotpress plugin & grabbed all my Zotero references into the database. The performance of that plugin is fairly slow with the ~500 refs I have at the moment, but it was helpful to get them there & I am going to look for a good way to move the data from however they stored it into Pod custom post type format.

Doing some more digging, it looks like Zotpress has a kind of caveman interaction with the DB…everything goes in a different table that mirrors the fields Zotero uses, and it all gets pulled in big Select queries unless one uses the custom IDs. The plugin apparently does a good job of re-syncing with Zotero and also pulls in thumbnail cover art for known books. So I guess what I want to do is write a routine to read Zotero’s table and add each/update row to a Pods storage form that fits the relevant parameters…maybe keep track of which fields are Pods and which are shared in case of re-syncing (I’m not sure if Zotpress actually sends updates in the other direction back to Zotero…could check the code).