WordPress Custom Fields Explained For Normal People (I hope)
I was sitting here trying to write up a post on how to make e-commerce a little bit easier, and I got hung up. My favorite solution for simplifying e-commerce is to use custom fields in WordPress, and they’re really easy to use, but really hard to explain to someone who isn’t already familiar with them. Worse yet, they’re based on fundamental WordPress concepts that normal people never have to deal with. After all, we use WordPress so that a lot of the complicated programmery stuff is already done for us. So if I’m going to describe custom fields, I need to explain how pretty much all of WordPress works in the process.
The payoff will be my next post on how to use Paypal and WordPress Custom Fields to create simple, elegant and fast e-commerce pages. Stay tuned for that.
So, what is a custom field? It’s a key/value pair. What the hell does that mean?
In WordPress, there is a fundamental divide between data and display (it’s a simplistic view, but if that bugs you, you probably don’t need to read this article, then). If you’ve ever installed WordPress before, you know that it’s a two-part operation: you upload .php files to your server, and you connect those files to a mySQL database. The parts that display live on the server, and the data lives in the database.
Imagine making 100 people fill out a form. Each person fills out the same form with different information. Think of it as 1 form filled out 100 times. Now, go find a magician, and give him your stack of 100 forms. He will shake them over a box so all the words fall off into the box, hand you the box, and leave. Now you’ve really got something interesting.
Sit down with your box-full-of-words and declare “Show me the name and age of the 61st person!” Out of the box flies “Margaret V., 34″. Next, declare “Show me the name, age, and eye color of all the people named John!” The details for four different Johns appears. “Show me the last form filled out!” and the information person 100 put down appears.
Are you getting the idea? The magical box-full-of-words is your mySQL database, and your commands are the .php files on your server. When you look at a .php file on the internet, the .php files say “TITLE goes here, DATE goes over there and the CONTENT goes underneath that”, reaches into the database, pulls out, say, post #34, and populates TITLE, DATE, and CONTENT with the information saved under that post.
It might be something like:
My Day
posted 3/04/2010
Today was wonderful! I got icecream!
So, are you starting to get an idea of how the data is stored? For post #34,
- TITLE:My Day,
- DATE:03.04.2010
- CONTENT:Today was wonderful! I got icecream!
For post #35, it could be
- TITLE:I have a Cat
- DATE:03.26.2010
- CONTENT:My cat is really cute when she lays on her back
We have defined information types, and the various information filed under them. The information types are KEYS, and the various information under are the VALUES. Collectively, we make KEY/VALUE PAIRS.
WordPress comes with tons of pre-defined key/value pairs already. Why do you care? Because you can take those KEYS, and put them in the .php files in your WordPress theme and make them display VALUES.
One of the things that’s awesome about WordPress is that, if you like, you can make up your own keys on the fly, and display them in your themes. That’s what a custom field is. (We’ve finally come back around to what a custom field is, yay!) A custom field is just an arbitrary key/value pair that you make up and use for your own sinister purposes.
For example, say you want your blog posts to display your mood. In your post, you go to your custom field, create a new key called “mood”, then set it to “bouncy”. Then, in your theme, under TITLE, DATE and CONTENT, you can add MOOD, and for every post you put a “mood” custom field in, it’ll output your mood in the blog.
Cool, huh?
I’ve tried to make this really simple, but what I hope was conveyed is that custom fields can be a powerful tool. In my next post, I’ll show you how you can use custom fields to create a quick-n-dirty e-commerce application for your WordPress website.
If you have any questions at all, please hit me up in the comments. I would HATE to have gone through all that and still be unclear.
Hyphen Available Now!, or, Well That Was Fast
Everything keeps happening here at once. Hyphen was released by Mangatune this weekend, and it’s already been featured in an ambient music podcast!
Ok, so, it’s the Magnatune promotional ambient music podcast, so it’s not THAT big of a deal, but still. Kinda cool.
Hyphen hasn’t made it out to iTunes or the Amazon music store yet, that takes a couple of weeks, but if you want to purchase a copy now, I’ve published a copy of Hyphen at Bandcamp. The individual tracks are a buck a piece, and I’ve set the album price to “whatever you like, as long as it’s 8 bucks or more”. Why would you want to pay more? You might love me, and be excited to know that this money is direct artist support, or if you pay $15 or more I’ll send you a physical CD to go along with your digital download. Shipping and handling will even be included. Ain’t that cool?
That’s not the only option, either. You can also go to Magnatune and subscribe as a member, and for $15 a month you can download Hyphen and every other album available on the website, DRM-free.
If you want to license a tune from this album, and use it attribution-free in whatever wacky project you have going on, Magnatune can help you out there. (And then send me a note. I love wacky projects.)
If you’ve got a podcast or a blog and you want to review Hyphen, kill some time talking to me, or play some of my music, just drop me a line, and I’ll be happy to work with you.
And, finally, go to Braindouche! and subscribe to the goddamn podcast already. It’s music and stuff. Some of it is quite pretty. It’s free.
So, to review:
Buy a subscription at my label.
Stupid Internet Trick #313: Track a Package
I don’t know about you, but I find tracking packages through the major carrier websites cumbersome. Tracking a package should be a simple, fast thing, yanno? Well, many thanks to Google for making it so. All you need to do is search for your tracking number, and you’ll get a link that says “track $carrier package $number”:
Click that link, and poof! You know where your package is.
I’ve been using this trick for years – probably read about it on Lifehacker or something – but I find that it’s something a lot of people don’t have in their database-o-internet-tricks. Enjoy!
Announcing the release of my first album, Hyphen!
In the next 2 weeks or so, I, your humble web geek, will be releasing my first album, Hyphen. It’s experimental dark ambient music, and it’s coming out on the Magnatune label.
How freakin’ cool is that?
The short version of the story goes something like this: I started 4 years ago, noodling around with sound software and publishing it on a podcast, and then one day listened to a new Magnatune dark ambient album and thought “hell, I make music like this, and better”. I sent off some tracks to the label, they came back with a yes, and here we are.
The album cover is Dani’s work, and it’s a confirmed awesome.
As I get to it, there will be more information on the podcast site, braindouche.net, but here’s what we know now: the release won’t be for a little while yet, but I’ll let you know when it’s live. It’ll be available for purchase on iTunes, Amazon MP3, and a few other places too, you can choose to get a subscription to Magnatune and get my album and a boatload of other great music for not a whole lot a month, and in the not-too-distant-future I will get some physical CDs printed up and let everyone know ahead of time, so we can have fun with preorders and whatnot.
Featured Project: Rancho Puma
Late last year, we were contacted by a fellow Pennsylvanian (well, we were still Pennsylvanians at the time) via our Etsy shop with a new-to-us logo request: design a retro, lounge-style logo for a home that didn’t yet exist.
Brief
The client and her family were searching for the perfect vacation home in sunny California. Daydreams and plans led to a name and a decorating scheme, and they wanted to surprise a family member with notepads, towels, etc. personalized with the vacation home’s signature feel. The client’s initial concept was for a highly detailed, illustrated logo with multiple elements. To keep costs down, and to maximize suitability for embroidery and screenprinting, we worked with the client to create a simplified logo that maintained the relaxing-with-a-martini, retro lounge feel that they desired.
Design
After a few preliminary sketches, I headed straight for our font library. I played with a wide variety of retro fonts (boy howdy, do I love Font Diner) to create a number of electrodoodles inspired by drive-in movie signs, refrigerator emblems, hotels in Wildwood, NJ, retro geometry, and the shows I watched on TV Land as a kid (back when TV Land was still Nick at Nite. Hell, back when Nick at Nite was just, yanno, nighttime programming on Nickelodeon.) In the end, I presented three concepts:
The bottom “bracketed” logo breaks all the damn rules. It’s hard to read. It wouldn’t embroider well. It’s hard to read. (Yes, that’s worth mentioning twice.) It’s still my favorite of the three, maybe because it looks like it should be the sign for a smoky underground lounge.
The center logo is sweet and saucy retro with a bit of slinky feline impact. Donna Reed meets Julie Newmar, if you will.
A variation of the top logo concept, with a splash of color, became the final logo, shown at the beginning of this post.
