Making use of Custom Fields

Custom fields in WordPress are a great way to add post/page-specific content outside of the main content area. Here’s a rundown of php snippets I use to get custom fields displayed.

<?php
	$info = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'side_info');
	if (is_array($info) && !empty($info)) {
		foreach($info as $bit) { 	echo $bit; }
	}

(above) get the data from the custom field named “side_info” and spit it out. Plain and simple. If there are multiple custom fields with that name defined, it’ll cycle through each of them and spit each one out one after the other. Custom fields will not make your data ‘pretty’ so include any necessary HTML tags.

<?php
	$info = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'side_info');
	if (is_array($info) && !empty($info)) {
		foreach($info as $bit) { 	echo $bit; }
		break;
	}

(above) The break; line is my cheat for only displaying the first (in case there are multiple) custom field values.

<?php
	$info = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'side_info',true);
	echo $info;

(above) Adding the true argument to the get_post_meta() function forces the result to be returned as a string rather than an array (default). If you know you’ll only have on value for each unique custom field, this is probably the way to go.

<?php
	$photo = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'hd_photo');
	if (is_array($photo) && !empty($photo)) 	foreach($photo as $img) { 	echo '<img src="'.$img.'" alt="" />'; }
	else	echo '<img src="'.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/hd_photo.jpg'.'" alt="" />';

(above) If I know that I’m using a custom field solely for images, I’ll use the field to store that path only and generate the <img> behind the scenes.

<?php
	$side_info = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'side_info');
	$info = '';
	foreach($side_info as $bit) {
		if (strpos($bit,'#')) {
			$bit = explode('#',$bit);
			$info .= '<img src="'.$bit['0'].'" title="'.$bit['1'].'" alt="" />';
		}
		else {
			$info .= '<img src="'.$bit.'" alt="" />';
		}
	}
	echo $info;

(above) If I’m feeling particularly fancy, I’ll store the path and title together with some sort of separator (ie. /images/whiskers.jpg#My cat Whiskers) and use php to split that data. In the example, I first check to see if the separator character exists, and if it doesn’t, I deliver the data as is.

<?php
	$side_info = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'side_info');
	$info = '';
	if (is_array($info) && !empty($info))
	foreach($side_info as $bit) {
		if (substr($bit, -4) == '.jpg')
			if (strpos($bit,'#')) {
				$bit = explode('#',$bit);
				$info .= '<img src="'.$bit['0'].'" title="'.$bit['1'].'" alt="" />';
			}
			else {
				$info .= '<img src="'.$bit.'" alt="" />';
			}
		else
			$info .= $bit;
	}
	echo $info;

(above) If your custom field will contain different kinds of data (text, images, etc…) you could even throw in a little auto-detection and process the data accordingly.