{"id":4226,"date":"2016-06-01T12:31:11","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T12:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/?p=4226"},"modified":"2016-06-01T12:31:11","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T12:31:11","slug":"wordpress-add-custom-type-custom-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wordpress-add-custom-type-custom-fields\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress: Add a custom type with custom fields"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve used any system that allows for custom fields \/ custom entities, you may find the WordPress system quite alien (e.g.: compare to SalesForce, Documentum, SharePoint etc).<\/p>\n<p>Like most tools, the WordPress customization model is typically a mix of configuration, code, and plugins, but since you can edit any code, anywhere in the system, you have to be a little careful (there is no notion of &#8220;versioning&#8221; the database, that I can see, for instance, so how to do migrations is an open question). <\/p>\n<p>Typically any piece of code you&#8217;d write yourself (e.g. adding a custom type) can be extracted and made into a plugin. Thus, part of customizing WordPress is a trade-off between deciding what to customize yourself and what to delegate to existing plugins.<\/p>\n<p>For adding a custom type, for instance, it&#8217;s pretty easy to just drop in some code:<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"php\">\n\nadd_action( 'init', 'create_post_type' );\nfunction create_post_type() {\n  register_post_type( 'error_message',\n    array(\n      'labels' => array(\n        'name' => __( 'Errors' ),\n        'singular_name' => __( 'Error' )\n      ),\n      'public' => true,\n      'has_archive' => true,\n    )\n  );\n}\n<\/pre>\n<p>This does start to show where some of the pain is going to come in &#8211; every attribute we add has to have labels for every action, which isn&#8217;t much fun to do.<\/p>\n<p>You can add custom fields as key-value stores, but they are hard to maintain and don&#8217;t support any complex value assistance behaviors.<\/p>\n<p>Consequently, the best thing to do is to install a plugin (&#8220;Advanced Custom Fields&#8221;) that manages this for you.<\/p>\n<p>Here, I&#8217;ve set up a custom field group for a section of my blog (&#8220;error messages from popular javascript libraries&#8221;). In my setup, each custom field is an attribute of an error message:<br \/>\n<img alt='' class='alignnone size-full wp-image-4229' src='http:\/\/172.104.26.128\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/img_574ba7abeb532.png' \/><\/p>\n<p>When you set this up, you have a fair amount of configuration options &#8211; you can make it a preset list of values, and make it conditional upon other fields:<br \/>\n<img alt='' class='alignnone size-full wp-image-4280' src='http:\/\/172.104.26.128\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/img_574ed4eceb344.png' \/><\/p>\n<p>The fields show up on the &#8220;new post&#8221; screen the way you&#8217;d expect:<br \/>\n<img alt='' class='alignnone size-full wp-image-4284' src='http:\/\/172.104.26.128\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/img_574ed566cef18.png' \/><\/p>\n<p>Now that you&#8217;ve done this, you have custom fields. In future posts I&#8217;m going to investigate how to handle migrating changes (as an application grows), moving data from server to server, and other issues involved maintaining such a site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Understanding the Wordpress model for custom fields<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[601],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}