[Plugin: Custom Field Template] This plugin is absolutely awful.

I’m not sure what you base your analysis on, but I use this plugin for almost every site I build these days – and in the last two years I think I’ve probably built about 150 sites (around 40 I have used this plugin on). And it’s really, really easy to use for the basics.

The stuff we were discussing on the other thread that you posted your comment on is pretty advanced stuff, really… but I think once you get your head around it this too is fairly straight forward.

Yes… I agree the documentation is a bit scant, but that’s what this forum is for. It’s certainly not a waste of space, and I think your opinion should come with a disclaimer that it is just that… your own personal opinion and not a qualified, technical analysis.

I have to say I’m quite impressed by your own plugins that you’ve built and shared with the community… oh wait…

I had lot of problems with this one. In fact, there is no documentation about this plugin at all. I never could display specific data in a good manner and structured in the fron-end. All comes in a table or nothing at all.

@ BrentFM, I appreciate if you would share any information about this plugin, particularly, how to display specific fields title and the content data in the front-end.

I agree, there is no documentation on the plugin. I had to read through all the forum posts to really understand it. On the other hand, if you don’t like this free plugin that your are not at all required to use, then don’t use it.

Hi Zeb. I think you need to be a little more specific with your questions. As evidenced by what I’ve said I’ve used it quite extensively – but only for the purpose that it was suited: building more usable custom fields – which is a back end thing. If you don’t know how to use custom fields in the front end of the site, then I suggest you read up on these first. You’ll need particularly to look at the get_post_meta function.

As far as my experience goes, I’ve only being doing back end stuff. I haven’t even tried to use the shortcodes yet (had no need for them, I do my stuff at a template level in PHP).

If you have a specific query, I’m more than happy to help though. If you check out my forum profile you might see a few posts that I’ve made to assist others with this plugin.

Seriously… if you’re even semi-serious about custom theme development then this plugin is AMAZING.

@brenfm, Thanks for your input.

Well, I put a lot of time to understand the though behind this plugin. My purpose of using this plugin was to make custom fields with calendar feature and be able to display the information also in the front-end.

One purpose was to make the content of the custom fields to be displayed in the front-end with the title like the following example but it never worked.
TITLE: Content1, Content 2, …

I was also trying to to show the content of a custom post type in a drop down menu in edit post page. However, this worked well at the time and I could see the content of the post type in the drop down menu in each post (edit mode). The problem was that I could not make the title and the content be displayed in the front-end! It was only numbers displayed and not the information!! My intention was actually to display a row of icons (the featured images of the above mentioned custom post type) which didn’t work at all.

It is also difficult to organize, for instance, check boxes and radio buttons, etc in the back-end. I wanted to display them in a row and any attempt to do that broke the entire interface in the back-end.

These issues made it very difficult to be able to use this plugin though there is no tutorial either.

However, if you have any ideas about the above mentioned issues, I’ll be very happy to try solving it again.

Thanks!

BrenFM, I appreciate your statements. My “disclaimer” came after hours of relentless aggravation ??

But as I’m building these sites I keep coming back to this plugin as being the best solution for a raw approach to getting template variables to work.

I hope that after learning its ins and outs a bit more, I’d like to branch off this master tree and contribute some hearty documentation, and a more thurough GUI for the back-end.

You havn’t heard the last of me yet ??

I agree too, no document, no description for each type, less example, no graphical user interface (GUI)

I can see option lists in setting page but I dont know what it does (some type)
No example (I see only 1 example there)

I think this plugin is for developer or at least understand coding and can copy/paste or understand what these “hideKey , true, label, radio, mediaButton, filesize etc.” stand-for and how to use them

I use this plugin because

1. many people use it (Downloads: 243,469)
2. there’re suggest link from codex to here
3. this is very first custom field plugin
4. so I hope a developer will alway continue developing this plugin in a long term

But I will lost my patient that I have to pay my time for try understand some type, key in option list that I don’t know where I can find the explanation

If there’s a choice, I will use below plugin instead

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

only one thing that i dont like advanced-custom-fields because they add one extra meta field
advanced-custom-fields plugin become popular now (Downloads: 88,211)

average download per day around 1,000 (and continue increasing) compare to this plugin around 500 (and continue decreasing) – you can check via stats tab
this stats tell which plugin people love to use

because advanced-custom-fields is super easy to use, easy to understand
you no need to learn or waste your time for just creating some custom field

finally advanced-custom-fields has GUI, no more coding, copy/paste

Thanks for the insight everyone. I’m about to start creating custom fields for several different page templates and I’m a little confused as to which plugin I should be trying at this point (i.e. “custom field template”, “advanced custom fields” or “more fields”).

For example, one custom page template will have several text area fields to enter custom data, and another one will need 2 separate input areas for users to upload a picture and a description (each input areas needs to have the ability to add more “user profiles” – picture and a description (post loop?).
Any thoughts?
Thanks.

The OP has clearly lost his mind ??

I’m like BrenFM, just about every site I’ve made int he last few years has used this plugin.

This plugin certainly has some flaws, but show me a better one and I’ll use that instead.

huh?!

This plugin is the best custom field plugin for WordPress that I’ve seen. It’s very active and has been continuously maintained by the author for YEARS. I can always count on Custom Field Template.

Like others have mentioned, almost every site I use has Custom Field Template installed.

Don’t knock a plugin because it isn’t plug and play. Try another plugin that will work better for you. In order to maximize the use of this plugin, you’ll need to know a bit of WordPress PHP templating.

Read up on Custom Fields here.
https://perishablepress.com/press/2008/12/17/wordpress-custom-fields-tutorial/

After using this plugin for about an hour, I got it to do everything I wanted. It’s highly impressive. The monkey-see monkey-do code included was very helpful.

Do I have nitpicks? Sure. Documentation is spotty. Yes, a couple listed things don’t appear to work. But think about this – can you fully document any complex WP plugin in Japanese? I don’t see any hands going up. That’s essentially what you’re asking the Japanese developer to do, but in English. Considering it’s maybe his second (or third) language, it’s good.

The default DD tags are pretty funky. And if I were coding this, I’d stick classes on things to make styling easier. But I simply used the templating capability to get my desired HTML and styling.

And you can set it to properly handle paragraphs and break tags. Try that without a TinyMCE plugin, Advanced Custom Fields!

That it doesn’t have a GUI may actually help it survive upgrades. Shortcodes work in widgets, wow, that’s the trifecta!

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. All hail CFT!

I cannot get “Page Template file name(s) (comma-deliminated):” to work. I have entered the exact template name (page-6.php) for a template that appears in the Template drop down on the page edit screen, and it just doesn’t work. I have to manually enter each page in the Post ID field, instead, which is cumbersome and not scalable at all. Does anybody have any insight into this issue? I opened a thread but received no response other than one person telling me to do exactly what I have already tried.

Thanks!

I think this plugin is great for my needs.

Thanks a lot !

great plugin, OP is smoking too much crack and trolling too many plugz

@trip_levine I had problems with this plugin too but I found another one called Types its much easier to use and the shortcodes are quite easy to insert on posts and pages, there is a pay version as well with much more stuff