Meta Box: The Best WordPress Plugin Framework For WordPress Custom Fields, Custom Post Types, and Taxonomies
WordPress has become such a powerhouse in the content management system (CMS) industry because of its infinite customization capabilities. While your typical installation of WordPress has standard pages and posts, you can take advantage of much more:
- Custom Post Types – A custom post type enables you to publish other types of content on your site. On our site, for example, we have Acronyms as a custom post type. Other custom post types may be a gallery, job openings, events, testimonials, team members, etc. Custom post types enable you to customize the management and publishing of these types of content.
- Custom Fields – A custom field enables you to add fields specific to a post type. To continue with our Acronyms type, we have custom fields for the definition, citation, and citation source.
- Custom Taxonomies – Just as posts have categories, so can your post types. For our Acronyms, we have a custom taxonomy to segment our acronyms alphabetically. This way our readers can just look at all the acronyms that begin with A, for example. Perhaps you want job openings on your site and wish to categorize the openings by department. Adding a custom taxonomy for the department that visitors can navigate to is quite useful.
All of these features are extended to WordPress via its robust API. A few dozen lines of code are all you need to add to your child theme’s functions.php file and you can fully customize WordPress’ capabilities for post types, fields, and taxonomies. And, you can customize the actual theme output to display all the information as you’d like. You can also add custom code to better organize your administrative panel to group the fields.
Of course, none of this is helpful if you’re not a WordPress developer. What if you wanted to build out these customizations without writing any code? Well, there’s a plugin for that!
Meta Box: Custom Fields Plugin and Framework
Meta Box is a Gutenberg and GDPR-compatible WordPress custom fields plugin and framework that makes quick work of customizing a website with—you guessed it—meta boxes and custom fields in WordPress. There are tons of options and extensions to keep you busy or add only what you need. All the while keeping the load light with their API. It’s also WordPress Multisite-compatible.
With Meta Box, you can build WordPress custom user fields and forms with their easy drag-and-drop interface.
Perhaps the best feature of Meta Box is that you can fully customize your post types, fields, and taxonomy… and the plugin will provide you with the theme code you need to add the customizations to your theme. The reason why this is so beneficial is that it removes the overhead of having a ton of calls to a plugin – which can both slow your site down as well as conflict with other plugins or theme customizations.
On Martech Zone, I had custom fields already storing data for my acronym definition, citation source, and citation URL… but I wanted to organize those fields nicely within the Gutenberg editor. I loaded up the plugin for Meta Box Builder and the Meta Box Group and was able to customize a nice panel within minutes:
I ordered and customized the field group the way I wanted, then clicked Get PHP Code and pasted it into my child theme’s functions.php file. The result is exactly the way I wanted it to look:
If you’re an agency, Meta Box offers an unlimited lifetime license that enables you to use the dozens of extensions that Meta Box offers. This can literally save your agency hundreds of hours in custom WordPress development for your clients. I was able to build and publish a custom post type, custom taxonomy, and custom fields for a client today and it took less than an hour to push the updates live to their production site.
Meta Box isn’t simply a plugin, its an entire framework added to WordPress that can be used to easily build and deploy hundreds of customizations to the platform.
If you’ve read Martech Zone for some time, you’ve probably seen me promote an array of plugins that could add some of this functionality. With Meta Box, I was able to move to a single solution to deploy across every client with every customization imaginable. It’s why I’ve added this plugin collection to our best WordPress plugins for business.
I have tried many frameworks for building meta boxes. This one is the best meta box plugin so far. The developer is pretty active, I have contributed several times. This plugin stays out of your way and has a pretty neat code base.
Ahmad Awais, a WordPress Core Contributor Developer
You can start using Meta Box with its free plugin, although I’d highly recommend the unlimited license and array of plugins that can be used to customize everything in WordPress.
Disclosure: Martech Zone is an affiliate of Meta Box and we are using our affiliate links throughout this article.
