How I made Wordpress custom fields work for me

I haven’t done any how-to posts in a while, but it’s time to put the counter back to zero. You might have noticed that I launched a blog about Facebook Application Reviews. It’s all about, um, reviews of Facebook applications, where each post contains a review for an application made for Facebook, and each review contains a rating. If there’s one unspoken convention across the Internet for reviews, it’s stars. Nice, yellow stars, one for each point in the rating. So when I started Facebook App Reviews, I knew I needed stars, and that’s where custom fields came in.

This is where the magic of custom fields happens:

If you want to make a new field, you put the name in the box in the middle and the value in the box at the right. Once you have done this, the field will be available from then on, and you can set a value for it on each subsequent post. The next step is just getting that value back in your template. Now, I know that the name of my field is “rating,” and every post in the category “Reviews” is going to have it, and it’s always going to be a value between 1 and 5. All I have to do is pull that value out in each post. Here’s the code I use:

$rating = get_post_meta($id, 'rating', true);

Seriously, that’s it. The post id ($id) came from the current post in The Loop, which you can get with get_the_id();. The second argument is the name of the field, and the last argument is “true” if you just want the first result (perfect if there will never be more than one entry per post) and “false” if you want to get an array. It’s very simple and I kinda feel lame writing a how-to for something so simple… but I guess if you didn’t know about this already, you might have found this useful. Just think about the things you can do… any kind of custom information you want to apply to your posts can happen right here… I mean, I can’t think of any specific examples at the moment, but I’m sure you can come up with something. Put it in the comments here when you do.