While WordPress obviously wasn’t initially designed to be a full featured CMS, and it still has a ways to go in competing with Drupal or Concrete, this is a great trick you can use to expand your ability to add content which is editable from the admin area. WordPress Custom Fields will allow you to add data below the post area when you are creating a post (or a page which uses “post” info basically). You can create a Custom Field “Name” and “Value”, the name is basically a key that you can use to call the content in your template…which is the great part of this as it allows you to place editable content outside of the main post area on a page. Here is a screen shot where you can see I have added two Custom Fields, one for a picture (I didn’t add the picture value yet, but you can add a pict via the main content area then just copy the HTML info and paste it in) and one for a quote the client wants to change on each page (click the thumb for full size).

code_screen.gif

You need to actually edit your templates a bit, but it is fairly easy. Once you have created your Custom Field Name and added some content (value) you can use the get_post_meta() (click here for more detailed info) function as demonstrated below, just swap out Custom Field name where indicated and you can place this in your template-

<?php $key=”YOUR CUSTOM FIELD NAME”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>

You can play around with adding html in the custom field or your template to get styling correct. This is how it looks in my template where I want the quote to show up.

code

I also recently discovered a nifty plug-in which will add tinyMCE toolbar functionality to the Custom Fields! Very cool.