As an experienced WordPress developer, I often get asked: what are custom fields, and why are they useful?
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Custom fields provide power users, designers, developers, and even beginners with more flexibility and customization options in WordPress. When leveraged properly, they unlock creative ways to structure, display, and manage WordPress site content.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover what you need to know about getting started with custom fields, best use cases, examples, and expert tips.
What Are Custom Fields in WordPress? (In-Depth Explanation)
To understand custom fields, you first need to understand WordPress post metadata.
When you create a standard WordPress post or page, information like the title, slug, author, status, content, and publication date gets saved automatically as structured data. This is what‘s known as metadata – data that describes attributes and characteristics about the post content itself.
Custom fields allow you to create your own metadata values that get saved alongside the default WordPress post data. You can define custom field names and input data that makes sense for your site, adding more context and flexibility in displaying/managing your content.
According to BuiltWith‘s technology usage statistics, over 70% of the top 10,000 WordPress sites leverage custom fields in their implementations, underscoring how useful they are.
Benefits and Usage of Custom Fields
Some of the benefits and common usage scenarios for custom fields include:
- Storing ratings, reviews, scores for content
- Linking related posts that share custom values
- Adding secondary short descriptions and summaries
- Including author bios and bylines without bloating post content
- Passing data to JavaScript for dynamic functionality
- Building custom forms for user-generated content
- Integrating with plugins to expand available data points
- Categorizing and tagging content with taxonomies, properties
- Creating custom post objects beyond standard posts
As you can see, custom fields open up endless possibilities, limited only by your imagination. They are the building blocks that allow you to take WordPress beyond its out-of-the-box capabilities.
Where To Find Custom Fields in the WordPress Dashboard
Since custom fields allow such flexible and expansive usage, they are hidden by default in the latest versions of WordPress:
But they are easy to access:
- On the post or page editor screen, click on "Screen Options"
- Check the box for "Custom Fields" to enable them
- Scroll down to view and manage custom fields data
This will reveal the custom fields metadata box for a post or page, where you can create new fields or edit existing ones.
Examples and Use Cases for Leveraging Custom Fields
Let‘s explore some real-world examples that demonstrate innovative ways to utilize custom fields in WordPress:
Storing Ratings and Reviews
Review sites like Consumer Reports could use a product_rating
custom field to store star ratings or scores for products and services reviewed. Displaying these ratings is as simple as calling the custom field value in templates.
Sites like Goodreads could also use custom fields like user_rating
and number_of_reviews
when displaying book data across their platform.
Linking Related Content
Online magazines often link related articles under a "You May Also Like…" or "Related Posts" section. Custom fields provide an easy way to connect this content.
For example, an article_type
field could be created to categorize content under genres like News, Politics, Business, Tech. Then these custom values can be used to display related posts programmatically.
Advanced usages could even build graph-style relationships between content using custom fields metadata.
Enhancing Author Profile Pages
Many news and magazine sites include author bios and contact info for their writers. By using custom fields like user_bio
, user_contact
, user_links
, etc. these details can be added to user records in WordPress and output on author profile pages.
No need to clutter actual posts and articles with this author metadata!
Building Advanced Custom Forms
Plugins like Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) leverage custom fields to create highly flexible, customizable forms and data structures beyond standard WordPress posts.
For example, real estate sites use ACF to build detailed property listing forms with fields for home specs, price history, neighborhood data, and more – all stored as custom fields.
The use cases are endless! Anywhere you need to store structured data beyond the standard WordPress post data model, custom fields come in handy.
Expert Tips on Leveraging Custom Fields in WordPress
Here are some best practices and expert tips when working with custom fields:
- Use lowercase/underscores for custom field names – Like
post_summary
rather thanPost Summary
- Be consistent with naming conventions across sites
- Make names self-explanatory – Choose semantic, clear names like
author_bio
- Optimize length – Try keeping names under 30 characters
- Categorize with prefixes –
wp_
for WordPress defaults,pt_
for custom post types
Following conventions like these will ensure your implementation remains clean and maintainable.
For even more advanced usage, development frameworks like Sage by Roots leverage custom fields to build highly customizable, headless WordPress solutions.
I hope this guide gives you ideas and examples of how to tap into the power of custom fields in WordPress. They are a versatile way to store structured data related to any type of WordPress content or user data. The possibilities are endless!
Let me know in the comments if you have any other tips or tricks for working with custom fields in WordPress.