Comments on: Global Custom Fields

By: MItche

MItche — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:02:47 +0000

Would love to see this as a plugin. Where can I find it? Id be happy to review it

By: Darfuria

Darfuria — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:08:59 +0000

I think it looks like you’ve made good progress, and now you should perhaps look at some sort of tag replacement method so that a user could use a shortcode (not necessarily one in square brackets, but something easier – maybe curly brackets like {FirstName}) to return their variable.

Then lots of people would use it ;)

By: Liam Goodacre

Liam Goodacre — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:45:44 +0000

Hey everybody, I wrote a plugin for wordpress global variables after reading this.

You can add variables, name them and give them a value.

You can then get an array of the values and use them anywhere in your code by using the name of the variable. For example:

As a global variable you add ‘FirstName’ with a value of ‘Liam’.

Within your theme you can grab the array by calling getGlobalVars():

$vars = getGlobalVars();

You can then access the variable via the name you specified:

echo “First Name: ” . $vars['FirstName'];

:D would anybody be interested in using/reviewing it?

- Liam Goodacre

By: Darfuria

Darfuria — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:01:02 +0000

Mmm, nice. Thanks!

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:08:33 +0000

There already exists the plugin Pods CMS for WordPress, which I use all the time. It's extremely customizable and easy to use. The Pods you create, or data objects can have multiple columns of data and can even be related to each other. And they are completely separate from specific pages/posts allowing them to be truly global.

By: Kyle Mac

Kyle Mac — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:48:51 +0000

I would love to see this solution done. Been thinking about doing this for loop exclusions, so that I can add different Post Types (categories) but not have to change every loop instance. But I can see how this would be very useful for a number of different values.

By: Coheed

Coheed — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:50:46 +0000

Can’t you add your own stuff to the options table and then pull it out with get_option()?

I’ve never tried it but I think that’s the proper way.

By: Hassan

Hassan — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:28:49 +0000

The general idea is really good.
Why not use a config file and define constants there? At least we can do that for our very own purpose (it may be hard for clients to do that).
We could easily hook up to wordpress settings page and add our own key pairs there. It seems more semantic to me.
Thanks for sharing Chris!

By: Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:25:21 +0000

I totally agree. You should write that up, or better yet, make a plugin! I fully admit this is a somewhat hacky solution. That’s what you get sometimes when a designer like me has to come up with development solutions fast.

I’d be happy to link to a better solution elsewhere, or I’d be open to a guest post.

By: lumpysimon

lumpysimon — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:21:20 +0000

Hi Chris

I can see what you’re trying to achieve and it’s could be useful when you quickly need something like this, but my nerdy programmer side is saying “I don’t like it at all!” – Putting a global option within a page seems very unintuitive and semantically wrong. In order to change the value of the option, you would have to go to ‘Edit Pages’, find the correct page, edit the custom field, save the page, etc.

Personally I would create a new simple admin screen to go under the Settings menu, with an input field that stores the value in an option in the WordPress database.

It’s probably about 10-15 more lines of code, but much more usable, changeable, future-proof and ‘correct’ in terms of using the inbuilt structure that WordPress provides.