Crafting Custom Fields with Code & A Plugin Meetup

Topic: Crafting Custom Fields with Code & a Plugin

Located in Library 21c in the Ent Conference Center

Meetup Agenda

• 6:30 – 6:45pm: Networking

• 6:45 – 7:00pm: WordPress News

• 7:00pm: WordPress Topic

• 7:30pm: Open Discussion: WordPress tips and helpful resources Open discussion about all things WordPress

What is a WordPress Custom Field?

Typically in a WordPress post you have a few fields to choose from, the title and the body of the page. This works for a lot of people but can be extremely cumbersome when trying to organize a lot of info. For example, if you have a website about books, you can add custom fields that will give more info about each book.

For example:

• Title of the book
• Author of the book
• Amazon Affiliate to purchase the book
• Date published
• Have you read it?
• Your commentary on the Book

WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data.  With some extra coding, it is possible to achieve more complex actions, such as using the metadata to store an expiration date for a post.

Meta-data is handled with key/value pairs. The key is the name of the meta-data element. The value is the information that will appear in the meta-data list on each individual post that the information is associated with.

Keys can be used more than once per post. For example, if you were reading two different books (perhaps a technical book at work and a fiction at home), you could create a “reading” key and use it twice on the same post, once for each book.

Here is an example of what this information might look like in your post:

• Currently Reading: Calvin and Hobbes
• Today’s Mood: Jolly and Happy

All levels are welcome to join in the conversion and to come to a meetup – Colorado Springs WordPress Meetup!