WordPress Plugin Highlight: Advanced Custom Fields | EP 662

WordPress Plugin Highlight: Advanced Custom Fields

1. What is WordPress Plugin Highlight 01:34
2. Custom Fields 03:22
3. “I have another example..”06:04

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:25 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast brought to you by WPgears.com. I’m David Blackmon. Tim, tell them who you are.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:42 David Blackmon: Sorry that almost dove off into the topic before we finished introducing ourselves. So ..

00:48 Tim Strifler: It’s all good.

00:49 David Blackmon: My bad. We patched record. I’m going to go ahead and be a little transparent. We batch record, you know, um, One time a week. So we may record up to 10 episodes at a time, and guess what? This is the last episode we’re recording today. So we’ve been recording for a while and I got a little tongue tied and I guess I got a little anxious to get into the topics so we could be done. But, um, you know what we love being here. We love sharing this information with you. And today we’ve got a great topic. WordPress plugin highlight a new thing. We’re incorporating every Tuesday. We’re going to talk about a new plugin that. Tim and I recommend highly for WordPress today. We’re going to discuss the first one advance custom fields, and guess what? Tim’s going to do a lot of talking. So Tim, go for it.

01:36 Tim Strifler: Yeah. This is, uh, one that I contributed. And so that’s why I’ll be talking mostly on this one, but, um, really quick about this new series that we’re doing. We’ve talked a lot about plugins and we’ve, we’ve lifted, you know, our favorite plugins and stuff like that, but we always just kind of give it. Brief summary, if that, cause we’re usually talking about it, uh, a long list. And so we thought it would be a good idea and opportunity to dive a little bit deeper and to highlight some plugins that we find super useful. And so at, at this point, we’re going to start with some free plugins that we use and, and highly recommend that. Maybe you don’t know or haven’t heard of, um, and then we’ll kind of go from there and we might cover some premium plugins as well, but to give you a little bit deeper and why it’s a great plugin and why we use how we use it and why we recommend it. Uh, advanced custom fields is, is highly, highly popular. So if you haven’t heard of it, um, That’s okay. It’s a really grateful again. And I’m going to tell you what it is. Basically. It allows you to add custom fields to any post type that then you can, uh, have come up on the front end. And so, um, if that doesn’t make sense, I understand it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around, but basically I’m going to tell you how I’ve recently used it, uh, with my own word, WordPress website, dot com. And basically what I did is I was creating a. A product page, uh, for my website. Um, and there’s certain things that I wanted to incorporate into every one of my product pages. For example, I wanted, um, The number of reviews to show, right. And that’s going to be different on every single product because I have a different number of reviews.

03:22 Tim Strifler: And so I used the, uh, advanced custom fields to add a custom field to my product pages. And so when I’m editing a product, I’m adding the title and I’m adding the product description. I can then post the number of, uh, Of current reviews that I have for that product. And it’s going to then show at the top of the page. And so I don’t have it to where it’s automatically updating right now. Uh, that’s another step, but basically it’s a way for me to get that little piece of data that’s unique to that product and then get it onto the front end of the site. And so, uh, that was one example, another one. Uh, custom fields I did is I added syncing instruction. So for example, um, some, uh, some plugins have different licensing requirements. And so I don’t want add it static to the product page template. I want it to be dynamic based on the product. And so I can write a quick sentence that says, you know, this product requires a license key, you know, it renews yearly unless you buy lifetime, blah, blah, blah. And then. Yeah, that’s going to be different for every product. Um, and the same thing with renewal info, um, it’s going to renew every year, blah, blah, blah. And so those are custom fields. And then, um, when creating the product page template, I can then pull those custom fields with the short codes that advanced custom fields provides. And so, for example, using the Divi theme builder, I can create a, a. Product page template and use those custom fields to basically piece together where I want content to go on the front end of the site for that template. And so advanced custom fields and any type of dynamic content or a page template, those things kind of go hand in hand. And so, um, you can basically add a data input field on the back end and then make it show up on the front end with the shortcode. So that’s kind of a. Quick  summary. David, did that make sense? The way I explained it, I know dynamic content and page templates and stuff like that can be a little bit difficult to wrap your head around if you’re not used to it.

05:29 David Blackmon: No, I think it made 100% perfect sense, Tim. Um, yeah, you gave some great examples and stuff. And, and I think at the end of the day, the bottom line with advanced custom fields is it allows you to add custom fields to any page, any post type in WordPress. And that’s ultimately the, the short answer, but you gave some wonderful descriptions and ways to use it and stuff which may give some people some ideas on how to use it on their website and stuff. So check out, check out…

06:00 Tim Strifler: And I do have one..

06:01 David Blackmon: Go ahead…

06:02 Tim Strifler: Sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off. I have one more example to illustrate the point to you if that’s okay. I I’m recently been rebuilding my documentation center for my Divi product website. And so, uh, using Divi’s theme builder, I was able to create a template that all of my product documentations will have. And I was able to add, okay, I want the header to be here. I want the main content to be here. I want this sidebar here. That’s going to show the other, uh, you know, documentation categories. And it’s able to do that with David’s team builder, but I wanted to wait to add in, uh, a search bar onto that page. Um, and then I wanted breadcrumbs and so I was able to use advanced custom fields to get the breadcrumbs over onto the page template. And, uh, yeah, it just made things really easy that way.

6:51 David Blackmon: Boom! Great example. All right. Head on over to wordpress.org, do a search for advanced custom fields and download the free version. Obviously, when we started this out, we said, we’re going to give you a few plugins that are free in the repository. We will eventually probably cover some premium plugins as well. Cause there are some great ones out there. And Tim. Guess what? We’ve got another great topic tomorrow until tomorrow. I’ll see you then

07:21 Tim Strifler: Take care. Bye. Bye.