WordPress API for Custom Fields with WCK

Custom fields have revolutionized developing sites with WordPress and creating custom fields is now part of the WordPress core.

There are several plugins that simplify this task and make it easy for you to define custom fields and metaboxes with just a couple of clicks.

However, the pain starts when you try to display all this information in your templates. For this you’ll need to write code and you’re not really comfortable doing that.

You start by searching the Codex for functions that are supposed to make this tasks simple. But they’re not that straight forward, and after spending precious time trying to fit all the pieces together, you decide this process is too slow. You project needs to be finished yesterday!

So you bounce to using copy paste tutorials without actually understanding what they do. This sound easier, but it all falls apart when you realize you suddenly have some error handling and bug tracking to do.

Why does a simple thing, like getting information regarding images or users, need so many lines of code? Can’t it be simpler and more intuitive?

What if you could use simple to understand functions that give you what you want directly in your templates without extra work to process that information?

What if you could?

• Save time by writing fewer lines of code (than using standard WordPress functions)
• Avoid error handling and bugs that will eventually appear once more and more code is added
• Get access directly to preprocessed data

Introducing WCK Custom Fields API

WCK Custom Fields API is meant to help you with just that. It consists of 3 easy to use, yet powerful functions that make it really easy to work with custom fields in your templates.

Let’s say you need to simply display a custom field in your theme.
With standard WordPress functions you’ll do something like this:

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<!--?php $my_meta = get_post_meta( $post-&gt;ID, 'my_meta_name', true ); if( !empty( $my_meta[0]['field-name'] ) ) echo 'Value:'.$my_meta[0]['field-name']; ?-->

Instead using WCK Custom Fields API, you’ll simply need one line of code:

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 <!--?php the_cfc_field('my_meta_name', 'field-name'); ?-->

*The function automatically detects the type of field and outputs values accordingly.

Things remain as simple even if you’re dealing with a repeater field, and need to output a specific entry (e.g. the second entry).
Instead of:

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<!--?php $my_meta = get_post_meta($post -&gt;ID, 'my_meta_name', true); if (!empty($my_meta[1]['field_name'])) { echo $my_meta[1]['field_name']; } ?-->

You’ll have:

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 <!--?php the_cfc_field('my_meta_name','field_name', false, 1); ?-->

*The 1 at the end, tells which entry to display (index starts at 0).

For frequently used fields like Image Upload, User Select or Custom Post Type Select(for relationships between posts), things become even more complicated with standard functions.

Let’s say you want to display the avatar image from a metabox:

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<!--?php $my_meta = get_post_meta( $post -&gt; ID, 'my_meta_name', true); if (!empty($my_meta[0]['avatar'])){ $src = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $my_meta[0]['avatar'], 'full' ); echo '&lt;img src="'.$src[0].'" width="'. $src[1].'" height="'.$src[2].'"?-->';
}
?&gt;

Using the Custom Fields API this will simply be:

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 <img src="&lt;?php the_cfc_field('my_meta_name', 'avatar'); ?&gt;" />

*The API function will automatically process and return only the URL.

You can also forget about error handling, no extra verifications being necessary when using the API functions.

This was just a quick glimpse of what can be achieved using the new WCK Custom Fields API. For mode details and code examples have a look at our documentation page.

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