Exploring the Custom Fields Interface

The Custom Fields module appears on both the Write Post and Write Page (See Book IV, Chapters 2 and 3) pages in the WordPress Dashboard, below the Post text box.

The Custom Fields module has two different text boxes:

✦ Name: Also known as the Key, you give this name to the Custom Field
you’re planning to use. The Name needs to be unique: It’s used in the
template tag that you can read about in the section “Adding Custom
Fields to Your Template File,” later in this chapter. In Figure 5-2, you can
see that Lisa’s Custom Field has the name mood.
✦ Value: Assigned to the Custom Field name and displayed in your blog
post on your site if you use the template tag that you can also read
about in the section “Adding Custom Fields to Your Template File,”
later in this chapter. In Figure 5-2, the Value assigned to the mood (the
Custom Field name) is Happy.

 

Simply fill out the Name and Value text boxes, and then click the Add
Custom Field button to add the data to your post or page. Figure 5-2 shows
a Custom Field that Lisa added to her post with the Name of mood and with
the assigned Value Happy. In the section “Adding Custom Fields to Your
Template File,” later in this chapter, we show you the template tag you need
to add to your WordPress theme template in order to display this Custom
Field, which appears in her post like this: My Current Mood is: Happy,
shown in Figure 5-3, where the Custom Field appears at the end of Lisa’s post.
You can add multiple Custom Fields to one post. To do so, simply add the

Name and the Value of the Custom Field in the appropriate text boxes on
the Write Post page, and then click the Add Custom Field button in order to
assign the data to your post. You will do this for each Custom Field you want
to add to your post.
After you add a particular Custom Field (such as the mood Custom Field Lisa
added in Figure 5-2), you can always add it to future posts. So, you can make
a post tomorrow and use the mood Custom Field but assign a different value
to it. If tomorrow you assign the value Sad, your post displays My Current
Mood is: Sad. You can easily use just that one Custom Field on subsequent
posts. After you create a Custom Field (such as the mood Custom Field),
you can access it in a drop-down list below the Name field,
so you can easily select it again and assign a new Value to it
in the future.
Custom Fields are considered extra data, separate from the post content itself, for your blog posts, and WordPress refers to them as metadata. The Custom Field Name and Value get stored in the database in the wp_postmetadata table, which keeps track of which Names and Values are assigned to each post. See Book II, Chapter 7 for more information about the
WordPress database structure and organization of data.