AKICODW: Wordpress edition

[oyceter]

I have been banging my head against my keyboard about this for the past week, until I realized that people here may know...

Does anyone have a good way to create multiple custom fields for a Wordpress post that doesn't involve going into the PHP and modding it? I think I can kind of do that, but it would be really ugly, have a whole lot of arrays in arrays in arrays I'd have to then process, and probably spit out a bunch of errors in the process. I've found some plugins (Verve Meta Boxes, Different Type, Flutter (looks un-updated), and Magic Fields (some commenter issues?). Anyone have any recommendations or anti-recommendations?

General Wordpress PHP modding tutorials also highly welcome!

Comments

[telophase]

I used the Custom Field Templates plugin but I set it up so long ago I don't remember how I did it. :)

[oyceter]

Oooo thanks for the link!

[badgerbag]

Yes use that!

[oyceter]

Ahaha, you mean the plugins? I am all for less effort!

[quivo]

Assuming that you've already tried using the default interface, the answer is probably to either live with one of the plugins you have listed up there despite the ugliness, or just dive in and sort the PHP on your own. Don't worry about code ugliness too much while you are working something out-- code that works is code that works, and as long as you (or whoever is maintaining it) can understand it, it should be fine, especially for something as small-scale as WordPress. One thing I would suggest if you are worried about errors is setting up a working copy of WP on your machine, so that no one but you gets to see the ugly errors. If you've ever installed WordPress by hand, you will easily be able to get it working with something like WAMP or MAMP. As for custom field plugins, I don't have any recs or anti-recs, unfortunately, but I do have some questions that might help you decide what to use.

- What do you need the custom fields on your posts for, and how many of them do you need? If you just need one or two text fields (e.g. mood, music) then going through the basic WordPress custom fields box OR using a plugin will probably be easier.
- Are you trying to have them broken out of the catch-all custom fields box, and in their own little section on the edit page? If so, you are probably going to have to do some PHP coding/tweaking to get them looking and working exactly how you want. Plugins, IMHO (remember, I haven't tried any of them so massive grain of salt), will only get you so far.
- Lastly, do you want the contents of the fields you're trying to add to display in your theme (i.e. on a blog post)? If so, you are going to have to modify the PHP in your theme files. *How* that gets modified might be through the use of a plugin, or by opening up the file and adding in a really short line of code in the right place.

Hope this helps. Wish I had a rec that could just solve this for you :P.

[oyceter]

OMG. I did not realize I could set up a working copy of WP on my machine. I am SO doing that next.

Thanks so much for the questions! They at least confirm I am thinking the right way! (I have terrible impostor syndrome re: anything to do with programming/coding.) But yeah, I have several fields (different link lists per different posts as well as a list of graphics for each page), so I was eying some of the plugins because they had a handy "add more of this field" thing so I didn't have to decide to hard code in 5 fields or something and then muck around in case I wanted more or less.

I think I would really like to have them as two separate fields (one for the link list and one for the images feeding into the jquery carousel I stuck in). My problem so far with the PHP coding/tweaking is I can't figure out a nice way to do the images... Hrm. Well, actually, I could probably just have a text array and input all the HTML myself instead of having separate fields for title and src and alt and everything! I did not think of that!

But yeah, I am also trying to get the contents to display in my theme, which I think I can kind of figure out (I have a jquery carousel added in there, but right now all the images are hard coded), so... I think I will try a plugin first, see how they do the code, and then see how much I can duplicate and/or steal and/or mod.

Thanks so much, that helped a lot!

[quivo]

Glad to have helped ;). Definitely hope you have a fun time poking around in the code-- wordpress isn't perfect, but it provides a really really easy way to dive into making code-level changes on your own.

For the images, is there no way that you can just upload them into Wordpress's media library like normal and then style up the display end? I'm sure there are plugins for lightboxes and carousels that you could repurpose for displaying lists of images when they are attached to a post. I'm halfway sure that you might even be able to associate a regular wordless gallery to a post, but I've never tried it, so cannot tell you for sure.

As for setting up your own WP install, check out the WP.org tutorial on hosted installs, especially the part that walks you through setting up a database and so forth. Installing WP on your own machine is basically just setting that up, then copying over the WP files into the right directory of WAMP or MAMP (usually a folder thats called htdocs or www). Let me know if you run into any crazy problems that don't come up on google, and I will try to help :)