Meta Box: A Powerful Toolkit for WordPress Developers
WordPress is quite powerful in its own right and you can use it to build a wide variety of websites and blogs. However, if you wish to do more with WordPress, say extend its functionality, what do you do? Maybe your theme or plugin requires some extra input fields? Yes, a custom field can help you manifolds.
For WordPress developers, there are various free and paid ways of adding and managing custom fields in WordPress. However, is there actually an ultimate solution? Today, we introduce you to Meta Box, the ultimate plugin for creating and handling meta boxes and custom fields in WordPress.
Meta Box is a toolkit meant mostly for developers. Let us see what it is capable of, shall we?
Meta Box: The WordPress Developer Toolkit
Before going any further, we must take some time to familiarize ourselves with what exactly Meta Box has to offer. In other words, let us take a look at its features and functionality.
To begin with, Meta Box offers over 35 custom field types and field options to help you customize your workflow. You can save quite a good deal of time and efforts using the custom field types. Beyond that, there are over 15 free and premium extensions to help you do more with the Meta Box toolkit.
If you are among those who love to tweak stuff, you are going to have a great time with Meta Box. It offers support for actions and filters so that you can build and do more with the plugin. In other words, Meta Box is by far the most customizable plugin you are ever going to come across!
Meta Box is a lightweight WordPress plugin with no admin panels, etc. Everything is loaded selectively for backend and frontend separately.
Doing More with Meta Box
Meta Box is a purely developers’ plugin. Once you install and activate it, you are given no custom admin panel or a separate customization page. Instead, you add the required code to your functions.php file and then the plugin swings into action.
Obviously, this ensures tight integration with your WordPress theme and also eliminates any form of bloat. You will not be intruded upon by advertisement banners, memory consuming scripts, or “please upgrade to pro version” notices. Meta Box lets you focus on what you do best — develop awesome things!
But, what if an admin UI is needed? Fear not, with the help of custom extensions, you can add admin UI as well as a lot more to Meta Box. Wish to integrate with the popular Yoast SEO plugin? Wanna add geolocation data and custom taxonomies? Meta Box has an extension for everything!
Meta Box Pricing
The core Meta Box plugin is free of cost and fully open source. All you need to do is get it from the official repository. It currently has over 200,000 active installations, by the way.
What’s the catch? Is the plugin a “lite” version? No, this is the full product.
You can take Meta Box a step further by means of paid extensions. Each extension costs differently and there are various free ones too. You can get the Primary Extensions bundle for $99 or have all the current as well as future extensions for a $199 one-time fee.
The Verdict
Is Meta Box worth the investment? Yes! The plugin is free and you have nothing to lose, but what seperates from the various other developer-friendly toolkits out there?
First, Meta Box is probably the only WordPress plugin in its league that does not “assume” anything. It does not offer you a gigantic set of admin settings to find your way through. Instead, it gives you a fully functional atmosphere that you can setup as per your needs.
Secondly, with its extensions gallery, Meta Box is not just a toolkit. It is an ecosystem in its own right. Plus, the free extensions are rather impressive too. Remember the Yoast SEO integration extension we talked about earlier? Yes, that is available free of cost along with many others.
To sum it up, Meta Box is a very worthy and useful solution for creating and handling custom fields and content types. If you have not already done so, you should by all means consider giving Meta Box a spin!
The post Meta Box: A Powerful Toolkit for WordPress Developers appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
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