Dean J Robinson - deanjrobinson.com

In my spare time I’ve been working on the second incarnation of deanjrobinson.com and I planning on making it more than a fresh skin over the same underbelly. First time around I was trying to build my site AND make the theme ‘releaseable’ at the same time, which meant I didn’t want to mess with the way certain things worked (yes, I know there were still some “weird” things that got through).

This time I’m building just for me, so I’ve been thinkin of new ways to go about some things, and to better use some of the functionality that Wordpress provides. One such feature is the custom fields that you can attach to posts and pages. Currently I use a few plugins that make use of them such as post ratings and post views, but I’m looking at using them more in ways that will speed up my posting and make updating certain content items much simpler. This is what I’ve got in mind.

I’m using the wordpress download manager plugin to track my downloads, and at the moment I have to add the download link, counter etc using there supplied quicktags whenever I include a download in a post. What I’m planning to do (and I already have this working in my local test) is to build the download ‘block’ into my templates, and just store the id of the download in a custom field.

So if a page has a download ‘associated’ with it the block will be displayed, if theres no download, theres no block, simple as that. This removes the need for me to remember the little block of code that I’ve been using to display the download links, and all I need to put in is the id of the download. I think its pretty neat.

An early example of what the output of the download ‘block’ might look like.

So that was the first thing I thought of and tried, then I got to thinking what else I could use these custom fields for. So far these are a few of the other ideas that could potentially be very useful to me.

• Storing the link to a support thread/topic for relevant posts
• Storing the link to the related ‘project’ page for things like Redoable and Twitt-Twoo
• Storing the link for the external url for my sidenotes

Not only will these changes make things a little quicker and simpler in the long run, they will also give me a little more flexibility in how I display the content of my posts and pages.

Does anyone else using these custom fields in strange/interesting/useful ways, if you do, it would be great to see what you’ve done.