[wp-xmlrpc] Custom fields

[Daniel Jalkut]

Hi Brandon - I have also been working on adding custom fields support  
recently, so I appreciate you raising some of these good questions.

I hadn't even considered the fact that WordPress.com doesn't support  
them out of the box. This raises the question ... doesn't it seem  
likely (or at least possible) that WordPress.com will add support for  
custom fields, perhaps for its paying users, at some point in the  
future?  It doesn't look like custom fields support is currently  
identified in the wlwmanifest, so maybe we should request that this  
information be added.

That said, in the short term, because I expect/hope other blog systems  
will adopt WordPress's conventions for Custom Fields, and because I  
think Custom Fields are generally an advanced "power-user" feature,  
I'm thinking I'll make it possible for any MovableType-variant blog to  
be configured with custom fields support, leaving it to the user to  
ensure that the configuration yields a meaningful result.

As far as I know the _prefixed custom fields are all intended to be  
filtered out of the UI. I'm tentatively planning that MarsEdit should  
also filter them from the UI, and furthermore avoid re-sending them  
(because it could be sending an outdated value). I'm relying on the  
apparent "lazy" behavior of custom fields in WordPress. That is, an  
unspecified value is nondestructive. I'm hoping other blog systems  
will adopt the same conventions so that omission of any particular  
custom field does not indicate deletion.

Daniel


On Sep 16, 2009, at 1:46pm, Brandon Turner wrote:

> I recently made a plugin for Windows Live Writer that lets users  
> attach custom fields to their post.  Now I have few questions for  
> anyone that is more familiar with custom fields then myself.
>
> 1)      Wordpress.com doesn’t allow you add / edit / delete from the  
> web interface, is there any reason to allow wordpress.com users to  
> custom fields through the plugin?  I can’t think of any unless it is  
> possible to buy a premium theme that uses custom fields, is that  
> even possible?
> 2)      There appears to be some special custom fields like _pingme,  
> _searchme, _encloseme.  Is it common practice to filter out these  
> from the UI?  It doesn’t appear you can edit these custom fields  
> from inside of the web admin panel.
> 3)      Is there a way to get all the custom fields the user has set  
> in the past other than calling a bunch of metaWeblog.getPost?  I  
> looked through all the documentation and didn’t see anything, just  
> want to make sure that I didn’t miss anything.
>
> -Brandon
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