As a WordPress developer it is the most common thing to add custom fields to a WordPress post. This post is going to give you the most easy and common way to add a custom field to WordPress post.
The biggest benefit of this method is that you can add the field to any post type whether it’s a custom post type or probably a WooCommerce product. As freelancer this method can tremendously reduce your time of development giving you and edge over others to perform better.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
Let’s move to the main subject and that is Advanced Custom Fields Plugin also commonly known as ACF. ACF is the plugin which let’s you add custom fields to your wordpress posts. Now heading towards plugin installation window and searching for ACF, there will be the plugin Advanced Custom Fields by Delicious Brains.
Install the plugin and you will find “Custom Fields” Link in the menu. Opening this will allow to create custom field groups. A single group will be used to define fields for a certain conditions criteria, for example custom fields for only WordPress posts. There are also conditional fields available which depend on other fields. For example show an input field of previous checkbox is checked.
The field group has different kind of fields available and can be used innovatively to create unique kind of websites for clients or business.
Following are some of the fields available in ACF to use:
- Text
- Textarea
- Number
- Range
- Url
- Password
- Image (WordPress Media Library)
- File
- And much more
For Coders
There are many other options you can explore in the plugin, but let’s talk about coding prospective of this plugins. It is very easy to get the data saved through custom fields in PHP with the documentation provided by ACF. For example get_field() function is used to get the custom field for a post where post id and field key is inserted into this function. Further information is available on the documentation page ACF.
PRO Version
There are certain features which are not available in normal version of ACF. For those feature PRO version is required. The fields such as repeater is not available in free version of ACF. Pro Version is good for you if you need advanced features in your website for custom fields. ACF charges on yearly basis for their PRO version which gets quite affordable easily. There are different pricing plans you can choose from.
Conclusion
Developing is happening and you are stuck at getting custom fields to work, head straight to Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for help. If provides a variety of features and different field types having an option to configure field group for different post types. Most of the features are available however some advanced features need PRO version to be installed. Developers can use it easily with PHP to reduce development time.
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