Sorting Data from Custom Fields in WordPress

With the redesign of the Ei Site, we wanted to take advantage of certain features native to WordPress, one of which was Custom Fields.

We wanted a simple way to display our client list using Custom Fields. Using built-in WordPress functions, it is pretty simple to pull information from Custom Fields. With Custom Field structure like this:

Name: client
Value: Name|Work_Done|Description|URL

You can use the get_post_meta() function to loop through all of the ‘client’ fields and pull the value for each and display to your page.

ORIGINAL CODE:

<?php
	$allOptions = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'client', false);
	if($allOptions) {

		foreach ($allOptions as $option) {
			$fullValue = explode ("|", $option);
			$name = $fullValue[0];
			$work = $fullValue[1];
			$text = $fullValue[2];
			$url = $fullValue[3];
		}  

	}
?>

The problem comes if you want to control the way the output is displayed. The get_post_meta() function does not provide a SORT property. So in order to control the order of display, we simply added an additional component to the VALUE field, a ’sort order’.

Name: client
Value: Sort|Name|Work_Done|Description|URL

Rather than just display the information in the initial foreach() loop, we stored the data into a new array, based on the SORT item for use later.

NEW CODE:

<?php
	$client_array = array();
	$allOptions = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'client', false);
	if($allOptions) {
		foreach ($allOptions as $option) {
			$fullValue = explode ("|", $option);
			$order = $fullValue[0];
			$client_array[$order] = $option;
		}
	}
	rsort($client_array, SORT_NUMERIC);
?>

With the data now stored in an sorted array, we can now loop through the new array and display the information in any order we want.

View Comments

meda says:

November 29th, 2009 at 7:48 pm

A practical example would be nice for those like me who know very little about php.

Luke Whitson says:

November 29th, 2009 at 7:51 pm

meda, that is the exact code I used. so it is as practical as it gets. what else would you like to see to help you out? let me know and i will be glad to assist.

meda says:

November 30th, 2009 at 2:36 am

Although I didn’t really get what adding SORT does to your array I’d like to see how do you display it on your blog to see if it clear things up.

Also, I see that you sort values within one post but how would you go about sorting posts using custom fields? I’d like to display posts using a date custom fields. The loop would show posts sorted by the dates used in the custom fields. Thx

Sorting image from custom fields « heidzir says:

January 20th, 2010 at 8:30 am

[...] Solution from others: Sorting Data from Custom Fields in WordPress [...]

Ray Gulick says:

May 14th, 2010 at 5:20 pm

Lost me somewhere, too. I don’t understand how to attach the numeric value to a particular custom field. Probably easy, but some of us need a more step-by-step explanation.

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