Custom fields are a very powerful feature within WordPress. Creating custom fields for certain content or as an extra hook can make life a lot easier for your clients and yourself. There are dozens of tutorials and ready-made solutions to create custom fields or even hook them to post-types and taxonomies on the fly. I’m more of a DIY guy though, and decided to scorch the web for a more ‘custom’ solution.
This is when I came across the powerful ‘developers custom fields’ plugin by Steve Taylor. It’s been essential to my WordPress projects ever since. This plugin is more like a kitchen with appliances and ingredients then a microwave-meal. There’s no settings page so you’ll need to declare everything in the themes function or a site specific plugin. As I usually don’t require my clients to create their own custom fields, it’s a perfect lightweight solution!
The tools included in ‘developers custom fields’ are very powerful. The plugin contains all the fields you’d need like text, text area, WYSIWYG, file upload, date picker, Google maps and plenty more. You can attach them to all the scopes you can wish for (categories, post-types, etc) and there are also plenty of capability options. Check the whole list and a how-to on the plugin page.
Steve also delivers excellent support. He accepts updates and bug-fixes, replies quickly on questions through the WordPress forums and lets us track all progress through the plugin page and Github. If he’d ever decide to stop with support, the code of the plugin is well understandable so you could probably wrap the necessary functions into your own plugin or theme.
To wrap it up, DCF has all the ingredients a plugin requires!:
It’s clean and lightweight – It does what I require it to do, nothing less, nothing more.
Powerful – it has all the fields, scopes and capabilities I could wish for
Excellent support – If I would miss a field or scope, the author is always open for feature requests
Understandable code – If support would be dropped, it wouldn’t be too hard to continue the development.
Happy WP’ing!