Custom WordPress Theme Design

One of the most powerful, but under-used features in WordPress is the Custom Fields features.

WordPress says:

WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data.

You can find the Custom Field entry form near the bottom of the Create New Post section of the administration backend, but to use it you will need to hack up your WordPress theme somewhat to get the data to show up. The data itself can be just about anything - your current location, mood, etc. - I have used it in the past so a client could include a photo thumbnail in each post at a specific place in his WordPress theme that was not possible through the standard post form.

This is the code that I used to impleiment the custom thumbnail:

<?php //get article_image (custom field) ?>
<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘article_image’, true); ?>

<img src="<?php echo $image; ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />

My suggestion is that you check out the WordPress codex about the custom field but don’t get bogged down in the examples that they show you. You can do almost anything with this data so get creative and start using the WordPress Custom Fields!

I know, I know, back to back WordPress plugin posts, but the incomparable Phil Gerbyshak turned me on to yet another WordPress plugin that I managed to overlook somehow.

ilfilosofo’s WordPress Database Backup Plugin is very cool - you can schedule WordPress to email your database to you, save it to your server, or download it to your computer. I know that you can backup your database yourself but you have to remember to do it - this plugin relieves you of that responsibility.

I used to use ilfilosofo homepage plugin before WordPress decided to make that a core function, but I missed this plugin, which makes me wonder, what other great WordPress plugins are out there that I have overlooked…

I was looking for a more reliable plugin to show You Tube videos inside of WordPress, what I found was a whole lot more:

Anarchy Media Player 2.0 for WordPress, WordPressMu and Standalone Javascript will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page. The WordPress versions also add buttons to the Rich Text Editor for embedding Flash swf and Director dcr movies as well as YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace, Apple iTunes iMix, and GoEar players.

I am not sure how I overlooked this plugin for so long, but it seems to be damn good - and - it works with WordPress MU, and there is a stand alone javascript version for you WordPress impaired people. Yes, it is hacked together, but it is hacked together well…