Nutsmuggling

Custom fields are an amazing and often overlooked feature of Wordpress. The Wordpress codex example of the use of custom fields is’t very inspiring.

Currently Reading: Calvin and Hobbes
Today's Mood: Jolly and Happy

Knowing what someone was reading while writing a post might be interesting, and of course a knowledge of his mood might help to make sense of his rants but hey, is that all? After reading the Codex I archived custom fields in the “Might mean something but presently seems utterly pointless to me” section of my brain.

I had to realise the usefulness of custom fields later.
davidebenini.it, the professional section of this website, features a styled tab menu.

These tabs link to static pages; more correctly to all the children pages of “Home Page”. These pages’ title are often different from the tab’s label. Thus, “Web Design + Development” links to a page titled “Web Design and Development”. Also, note the different styles of the first and second line of the tab. How to get these tabs from a page dynamically? The answer is, of course, through custom fields.

My main pages feature a couple of custom fields:¹

As you see, they correspond to the first and second line of the title. Setting these fields inside each main page, I can choose a tab-specific title, segmented in two lines.

And now to the code.
For long chunks of code I tend to use the functions.php file in the template folder. This file serves to store functions; you can use it to keep your template files clean.

function white_page_menu() {
    $menu = "<ul id='nav'>";
    $args = array(
    'post_type' => 'page',
    'numberposts' => 5,
    'post_parent' => 10,
    'order' => 'ASC',
    'orderby' => 'menu_order');
    $pageslist = get_posts($args);
    foreach ($pageslist as $post) {
        if (is_page($post->ID)) {
            $menu .= "<li style='display: inline' id='selected'>";
        } else {
            $menu .= "<li>";
        }
        $menu .= "<a href='?page_id=$post->ID'>";
        $custom_fields = get_post_custom($post->ID);
        $first_line_field = $custom_fields['title-first-line'];
        foreach ( $first_line_field as $key => $value )
        $translated_value= p__($value);
        $menu .= "<strong>$translated_value</strong>";
        $second_line_field = $custom_fields['title-second-line'];
        foreach ( $second_line_field as $key => $value )
            $menu .=  p__($value);
        $menu .="</a></li>" /* Fine menu-tab */;
    }
    $menu .="</ul>";
    echo $menu;
}

Then in my template file I just added:

<ul id='nav'><li><a href='?page_id=11'><strong>Personal</strong>details</a></li><li><a href='?page_id=8'><strong>Web Design</strong>+ development</a></li><li><a href='?page_id=9'><strong>Translation</strong>+ localisation</a></li><li><a href='?page_id=22'><strong>Academic</strong>career</a></li><li><a href='?page_id=23'><strong>Traditional</strong>music</a></li></ul>

As you see, my functions calls both title-first-line and title-second-line, and wraps their values into different style tags. This way, if I choose to add another main page to my website, I just have to make it a child of “home-page” and assign it some value to the title-first-line and title-second-line custom fields.

Of course this is just an example of the use of custom fields. You could use them to add a subtitle to you post, or define other specific value that you will call in your template.

Enjoy!

Notes

1. I have deleted the extra fields for clarity’s sake. [↩]