A little while ago, while working on a site built by another developer, I came across this rather interesting example of how to use custom fields badly in a WordPress theme (abbreviated for, well, brevity):

(The original also did this for meta keywords and meta descriptions — but the demonstration of this “logic” only requires one field.)

 
<? if (is_front_page()) { ?>
	<title>Handwritten title</title>
<? } elseif (is_page("page-name")) { ?>
	<title><?= get_post_meta(334, 'meta_title', TRUE); ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<? } elseif (is_page("page-name-2")) { ?>
	<title><?= get_post_meta(383, 'meta_title', TRUE); ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<? } elseif (is_page("page-name-3")) { ?>
	<title><?= get_post_meta(381, 'meta_title', TRUE); ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<? } elseif (is_page("page-name-4")) { ?>
	<title><?= get_post_meta(383, 'meta_title', TRUE); ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<? } elseif (is_page("page-name-5")) { ?>
	<title><?= get_post_meta(387, 'meta_title', TRUE); ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<? } ?>

And so on. For approximately 40 separate pages. It made my brain hurt. For reference, the exact same thing — for all pages on the site — could have been accomplished (with better fallback conditions, in fact) with this code:

 
<?php if (get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID, 'meta_title', true)=="" && is_page() ) { ?>
	<title><? wp_title('|', true, 'right'); ?> <? bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<?php } else { ?>
	<title><?php echo stripslashes(get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID, 'meta_title', true)); ?> | <? bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<?php } ?>

Now, the original code may actually look cleaner — it does, after all, have fewer functions and fewer variables. However, the second example is a hell of a lot more maintainable.

If you add a new page to the site in the first example, you have to:

1. Create the new page.
2. Add a custom field with the title.
3. Check the new page’s ID.
4. Find the theme file which contains the meta data references.
5. Add a new line in the elseif loops which references your new page first by slug and then by ID

With the second example, you simply:

1. Create the new page.
2. Add a custom field with the title.

No coding, no PHP, no editing themes — it just works. Well, isn’t that handy? This is just basic good coding practice: make your code reusable. There’s absolutely no reason to code something into your WordPress Themes which is not readily transportable unless you’re doing yourself a favor by avoiding an unnecessary server call by hard-coding the site name or other known elements.

The basic difference between these two examples is simple: the first requires you to hard code the ID and page slug for each example; the second grabs the post ID from the existing post object. The second example also has a fall-back if no information has been entered in a given custom field — which is lacking in the original code.

Word to the wise: save yourself some work!

New in Version 1.2.1:

• Added ability to delete CSS from the style library

New WordPress plugin: WP Post Styling. The plugin serves only one purpose: to create a place to add custom styles which will only apply to the current page or post in your WordPress blog.

Although not widely used on the internet, it’s a valuable magazine design technique to give each article a unique look and feel. A look and feel which shows the face of that article in a light which best represents the subject, topic, or style.

This plugin is intended to make that kind of post-by-post styling simpler.

It’s not that you can’t readily do this in WordPress — either by using a theme which applies style hooks for unique articles, by utilizing WordPress conditional functions to check whether a given page is active, or by whatever other means you might imagine — but this makes it much simpler, since you can simply enter the desired styles into a textarea directly in the post.

Comments and requests should be made at the WP Post Styling home page.

See the change log at WordPress.org.

Comments on this post are closed; please make comments at the WP to Twitter home page!

Technically, this plugin has been available from the WordPress plugin directory since last Monday, but today is it’s official launch. This is for two reasons: first, it gave the plugin a week to “shake out the bugs,” so that the official launch could be as stable as is reasonably possible.

Second, it’s my birthday, so I’ll be able to remember when the plugin launched. Isn’t that sweet?

The plug-in is pretty straightforward: it posts a status update about your new WP post to Twitter, passing by Pierre Far’s Cli.gs URL shortening service on the way. If you have a Cli.gs API key, you’ll get the added bonus that your Cli.gs will automatically show up in your Cli.gs account, so you can track the statistics of that Clig right from the beginning.

By default, the plugin will take a chunk of text you’ve defined and your post title and truncate them to an acceptable length (including your Cli.gs post URL) to send over to Twitter. However, you don’t have to just accept this stock text: you can custom author your Tweet for every post, using the WP to Twitter custom field in your post authoring interface.

Read more about WP->Twitter

Download it at WordPress!