Many of us don’t use Custom Fields much in WordPress. In fact, I didn’t know why it existed in the first place. What does it do? I am guessing many people who use WordPress don’t use this feature at all. But hey, I was recently studying several articles on what this could really do and I am still exploring. It looks like it does almost everything the easy way. You just have to know how to use it. 
So, how do we use it?
Each custom field in WordPress has a Key=Value pair. You can see all the details on how we can use it on the WordPress site also. Each of these Key=Value pair can be used to describe anything. For example, a mood when you are writing this post or what you are doing such as sipping coffee, or reading a book during the week etc. These are few basic things you can do that are described properly on the WordPress site. You can then show these actions on each post on your blog.
Custom Fields is just not limited to these small features. They can do pretty much complex things. For example, recently I was trying to integrate a simple feature to this blog – show thumbnails on main posts page (list) and show its larger version on the detailed post page. By default, when you add a picture you can only get either thumbnail or larger version on both of these pages. But if want to tweak a little of the coding you can achieve it and it looks much better. I will describe how we can do that in my future posts.
Another thing you can do with custom fields is separate a page. Recently, I had one of my clients request me how to list the page for public but not show it in the Pages Navigation. He was trying to create a Thank you page and redirect a visitor to that page after signing up a form. And sensibly why show the Thank you Page as a link on the main navigation. He tried to make the page Private but you can only see if you are logged in and people aren’t logged in to your blog (normally). Whats the workaround?
Oh well, thats easy as you may think. One way is to go to the themes list pages function exclude that particular page (perhaps use its ID). Yep, thats a good approach. But what if client isn’t programmer savvy and to tell the truth, its pretty hard to find out the ID of pages or categories. I struggled for sometime.. lol.
So, how do we make things easy for the client who doesn’t understand programming. Yes, of course use custom fields. We just have to write a small function and call that function while listing the page. And then use the custom field such as ShowInNav = No. Each time you want the page not included in the navigation just add that Key=Value pair and it works! Now your page is public yet not accessible on the main navigation.
We just added WordPress custom field support to Blogo, our desktop editor for the Mac:
http://drinkbrainjuice.com/blogo