Custom Fields - Meta Box

Optimizing Database for Custom Fields in WordPress

Updated: August 11, 2021September 27, 2017

Custom fields is a way for WordPress to store arbitrary extra data for content (posts and custom post types), such as author name, published date for a book. To make custom fields flexible and compatible with different kinds of data, WordPress designs the meta tables (post meta, term meta, user meta, and comment meta) in the form of key-value. According to that, each custom field is stored as one row in the database. This approach allows developers to store unlimited data regardless of its structure. But, the downside is the rapid bloat of the database. Because the number of custom fields is usually very large. This article will present solutions to optimize the storage of custom fields in the database to help boost your website performance.

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What is Custom Fields in WordPress?

Updated: March 14, 2022July 5, 2018

Custom Fields is an important and useful feature in WordPress and bring us a very high customization ability. So, let's find out the basics, relevant techniques, and excellent applications of Custom Fields in this series.

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Easy Way to Add Custom Fields in WordPress Without Plugins

Updated: October 19, 2021July 12, 2018

In the previous post, we have learned the basic concepts of custom fields and their applications. In this post, we will learn how to add custom fields to a WordPress site without coding or using a third-party plugin.

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How to Create Custom Meta Boxes & Custom Fields in WordPress?

Updated: October 19, 2021July 19, 2018

The default custom fields functionality in WordPress is to help end-users customize their websites fast and easily. However, it is limited to only text fields and thus, is not enough in most cases. In this post, we will learn how to take control of custom fields by creating our own new field types.

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Get Posts by Custom Fields in WordPress - Part 1

Updated: October 23, 2021July 26, 2018

In the previous articles, we've known about what Custom Fields is and the application of custom fields which allows users to add arbitrary information into posts. But what do you do after that? In the recent post, you also learned how to add custom fields programmatically and display them in your theme. But you’ll see a shortcoming if there is no classification and searching. This post will guide you on how to get posts by custom fields in WordPress and we'll create an interesting application: advanced search.

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Applications of Custom Fields in WordPress

Updated: August 9, 2021August 8, 2018

As we know, custom fields is used to add more data to some objects in WordPress such as posts, pages, taxonomies, users, and comments. The two main purposes of custom fields are to describe and filter those objects. In this post, we'll learn what specific applications custom fields has in reality.

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How does WordPress Store Custom Fields? #1: Data flow

Updated: August 9, 2021August 22, 2018

Until now, we’ve known what custom fields is and how to use the functions provided by WordPress to work with custom fields. You’ve prepared everything needed to develop practical applications. But wait, before embarking on doing something new, you had better dig a bit deeper to have thorough understand custom fields' nature. It’s time to find out an answer to the question: “What really happens with custom fields when I click Save post?”. The two coming posts will give you the answers.

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How does WordPress Store Custom Fields? #2 Database

Updated: October 30, 2021September 8, 2018

Now, you know what custom fields is and in the previous post, we stopped in the step “WordPress calls the update_metadata function to store data from custom fields in the database”. In this post, we’ll follow up that flow to figure out how WordPress organizes the database.

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What is Meta Box Plugin? How to Use It to Create Custom Fields in WordPress?

Updated: March 1, 2021October 8, 2018

The importance of meta box and custom fields in WordPress has been emphasized in the previous posts. Due to their significance, they are used a lot and frequently in the development process of a plugin or theme to satisfy the need of users.

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Get Posts by Custom Fields in WordPress - Part 2

Updated: August 6, 2021November 24, 2020

In part 1 of this series, we learned about how to get posts by custom fields in WordPress with the WP_Query function. However, if we need to deal with databases, it’s better to find another faster, easier, and more convenient way. That method is joining wp_posts and wp_postmeta tables together, and then querying by SQL. In part 2 of the series “How to get posts by custom fields in WordPress”, we’ll use this way to add the advanced searching feature that allows users to search by keywords in posts / pages titles and custom fields content.

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Series: Custom Fields