Question

I am building a WordPress theme and am onto displaying the custom fields of a custom post type. Instead of writing this a bunch of times:

<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, 'custom_item', true)){ echo $post_meta_data['custom_item'][0]; } ?>

Can’t I write a function to shorten this process? Something where I would pass it a variable and it can get plugged into the function. This is what I have so far with no luck:

<?php 
    function display_meta($custom_meta) {
    if(get_post_meta($post->ID, $custom_meta, true)){ echo $post_meta_data[$custom_meta][0]; }} 
?>

And then I want to be able to do something like this for each field:

<?php echo display_meta('custom_item') ?>

I am still relatively new to PHP and this is my first time trying to write a function like this. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

looks like you need to pass $post and $post_meta_data to the function as well.

<?php 
function display_meta($custom_meta, $post, $post_meta_data) {
    if(get_post_meta($post->ID, $custom_meta, true)){ 
        echo $post_meta_data[$custom_meta][0]; 
    }
} 
?>

and you’re attempting (incorrectly) to do an echo twice. Something like this would work better

<?php display_meta('custom_item', $post, $post_meta_data) ?>

You should do some simple php tutorials and learn about functions and scoping tho.