The WP-Custom plugin. What's it all about?

You heard the news! My WP-Custom plugin got WordPress.org hosting approval a few days ago. So I finally uploaded it into their plugins repo and already got some positive feedback on Twitter and IM. Anyways, some still can’t figure out what I made the plugin for, so here’s some explenation.

I assume that you’ve read the plugin description on the wordpress.org website or the readme file in the plugin, so I thought I could just give you a few examples. As I wrote earlier it’s all about custom fields. It’s the way they look, and the way they should look. Let’s look at the Equilibrium theme for a while. There are images associated with every post and if you look closer, they’re taken from the ‘image’ custom field. If you read the installation tips you’ll figure out that you have to put the URL of the image (303×231 for big ones and 162×118 for the small ones) in the ‘image’ custom field.

Well, if I were the developer of that theme I’d use two custom fields ‘image_big’ and ‘image_small’ (you get my point…). Okay, so three days have passed and I already forgot what the dimensions of the images are and whether I should write the complete address in the custom fields or is it relative to the uploads directory. Jeez! I’d have to go look at the dimesions and open another post and check the custom fields there.

Now let’s try another way. Define two custom fields using WP-Custom with those same unique IDs: image_big and image_small. Define their captions: ‘Image 303×231 URL’ and ‘Image 162×118 URL’. Voila! You’ll never forget the dimensions again. Just think about how much time you can save with this, especially if you’re blogging in a team. So what does it require? A few plugin setup and some theme customization. It’s very simple after you get it right.

I’m also thinking about adding the feature to export and import WP-Custom settings. It’d be nice to ship those with a customized theme, making it an out-of-the-box product, right?

I’ve setup a pretty cool page with all the information you’d need about the plugin here: WP-Custom Plugin.

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

8 comments

  • Nice gravatar, spending alot of time in front of your fave editor or cmd_prompt?? LOLZ! Nice to see useful fresh info from a fresh perspective!

  • is it possible for me to add code inside every post ? like auto add [code] post content [/code-] for every post ? and how to do it ? this is my first time trying with custom field ..
    thanks and nice plugin

    • Sure. Define a 'textarea' custom field in WP-Custom then edit your theme and add some php code: if (function_exists("wp_custom")) wp_custom("unique_id"); where unique_id is the unique id of your defined custom field. You can wrap it up with [code] tags or whatever in the theme…

  • Было бы не плохо если бы еще был пример мануал по созданию плагина для интерфейса админки.
    It would be not bad if still there was an example a manual on creation of a plug-in for the interface admin.