Metadata

Even though Gutenberg (WordPress Block Editor) has become our new reality and FSE themes are also on their way, we still need meta boxes on our projects. The meta boxes aren’t necessarily classic meta boxes for posts, it could be additional settings fields for taxonomies, users, comments and even options pages. It means that we are going to need them for a very long time. Maybe even forever.

Of course the best way to create any of the mentioned above is to code by yourself. But it could be really time consuming especially if you have a lot of fields (and working on lots of projects).

That’s when metabox plugins come into play. The most popular ones are Advanced Custom Fields and Carbon Fields. Also in this article I am going to mention my own metabox plugin I developed for my needs which is Simple Fields.

The idea of this tutorial is to become more conscious to what plugins we are using to achieve our goals, because there are lots of slow WordPress websites out there, not because WordPress is slow but because sites are overloaded with tens and even hundreds heavy plugins.

Let’s look the truth in the face – of course I am going to tell you how cool my Simple Fields plugin is. But I am not going to say “use it”, because I understand clearly that sometimes its functionality is not enough, then you can probably look at Carbon Fields plugin. And even Advanced Custom Fields PRO has its own advantages though I am not a big fan of it.

This tutorial is a small addition to my another tutorial about creating posts with REST API in WordPress, because there I didn’t mention how to work with metadata and what moments you have to keep in mind.

As a result of this tutorial we will just create a simple draft post with a couple custom fields in it.

I already have a plenty of tutorials on my blog where we created different kind of fields for Gutenberg sidebars, for example an image field, a gallery field, a checklist and even a dropdown with posts.

There is also my Simple Fields plugin for those of you guys who don’t want to mess up with JSX and React and prefer to use simple PHP code snippets instead.

But now let’s talk about creating a repeater field. First things first – a screenshot:

Now so long ago I published a tutorial about creating a custom image control component for plugin sidebars. The very first question in the comments was “How to select multiple files”?

So let’s dive into it now.

First things first let me show you what we are going to create here.

I already have a couple of tutorials about working with metadata in Gutenberg, so you can find a complete guide to it and a separate tutorial about image fields. Now let’s continue to dive into it and discuss types of fields that consist of multiple input elements.

We are not going to dive straight into the repeater fields (let’s do it later) and discuss something more simple, a checklist field for example.

That’s how it is going to look like:

I have a super-detailed tutorial about plugin sidebars on my blog. But there were described only some basic field types like TextControl, TextareaControl and ToggleControl.

What about something much more interesting? I mean when there were no Gutenberg years ago, I already created an image uploader field for WordPress meta boxes or options pages. What about creating a custom ImageControl component for Gutenberg sidebars right now?

In this tutorial I am going to show two methods how you can add additional user profile fields in WordPress admin area. In the first one we are not going to use any plugins at all, in the second one – we will do the same, but with the help of my Simple Fields plugin.

Let’s get started, I think. Here is what we are going to create: