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Labs

Labs are hands-on coding projects that you build along with Tonya as she explains the code, concepts, and thought processes behind it. You can use the labs to further your code knowledge or to use right in your projects. Each lab ties into the Docx to ensure you have the information you need.

Each lab is designed to further your understanding and mastery of code. You learn more about how to think about its construction, quality, maintainability, programmatic and logical thought, and problem-solving. While you may be building a specific thing, Tonya presents the why of it to make it adaptable far beyond that specific implementation, thereby giving you the means to make it your own, in any context.

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Meta Box Basics

Save Process & $_POST

This episode is VERY important as you’ll learn how a form in the browser is processed back on the web server. The entire back-end interface on the edit post and page screens is an HTML form. The meta box you built earlier is a component of input fields within that form. When you click on Publish or Update, all of the content on the page is sent back to the web server and stored in the $_POST super global in PHP. Big points here for you to master: Saving a post, page, custom post type, etc. triggers a post back […]

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Meta Box Basics

Meta Box HTML

When the screen in the back-end renders, WordPress calls our meta box callback, which we called render_meta_box. In your code, that function does the following tasks: Grabs the metadata out of the database. Does processing if you need it. Loads our view file, which gets rendered out to the browser. Make sure you do this episode with me, as I walk through the code, HTML, and thought processes. You’ll see how little code it takes to create the meta box’s HTML. Resources Variable scope when including files (such as the view file) wp_nonce_field get_post_meta

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Meta Box Basics

Add a New Meta Box

The first step is to register your new meta box with WordPress. You’ll need to register a callback to the action event admin_menu and then use the WordPress function add_meta_box. Let’s walk through the code, look at the function in WordPress core, and look at the HTML.

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Meta Box Basics

What is a Meta Box?

Let’s recap what a meta box is and why and when you should build a custom one. A meta box is a UI (user interface) component to allow interactivity with content but without the technical aspects. Think about that statement. A meta box makes it easy to interact with content by adding, editing, deleting, etc. WordPress comes with a built Custom Field meta box. That interface is fine for simple projects or your own stuff. But for clients, we want to make it easier, more intuitive, and less technical. A meta box lets us abstract away the complexity such as […]

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Meta Box Basics

Lab Introduction

Let’s get you ready to start this lab. I’ll walk through your setup. Use the same setup and sandbox you created in the Post Metadata Basics lab, including having Kint installed. You need to clone the starting plugin from GitHub. You will need Git installed on your machine in order to do this. Follow along with me in the video to clone it to your machine. Make sure the Meta Box Basics plugin is on the “master” branch by typing: git checkout master Then activate the plugin.

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Meta Box Basics

WordPress Meta Box Basics

A meta box provides an interface for site owners, author, editors, admins, etc. to view, add, delete, and edit custom fields (post metadata). In this hands-on coding lab, you will create a meta box boilerplate from scratch, one that you can use on any project.

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WordPress Post Metdata Basics

Wrap it Up

WooHoo!! You did it! Great job! Let’s review what you learned in this lab: Custom field is the same thing as post metadata, metadata, and post meta. Custom field refers to the interface, such as a form. Post metadata refers to the code and database. You can use the built-in meta box to add, update, and delete custom fields in the back-end. WordPress provides functionality to get, update, add, and delete metadata programmatically in your theme or plugin.

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WordPress Post Metdata Basics

More Custom Field Functions

Up to this episode, you have learned how to get, update, add, and delete post metadata. But WordPress provides additional functionality. Let’s explore these functions together: the_meta() get_post_custom() get_post_custom_values() get_post_custom_keys()

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WordPress Post Metdata Basics

WordPress Post Metadata (Custom Fields) Basics

Using post metadata, we can add additional information to built-in and custom post types (content). We use this information for specific filtering, querying, grouping, and processing tasks. In the back end, we build metaboxes whose custom fields provide an interface for authors to input the metadata. In this hands-on lab, you will learn the basics of WordPress post metadata and the custom fields you build for their interface.

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WordPress Post Metdata Basics

Delete a Custom Field

In this episode, you and I will explore how to delete a custom field (post metadata) programmatically from the database. You’ll see how delete_post_meta() works and how you can target specific meta to delete.

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