I'd like to add custom fields to a certain category. A category only has the following fields:

Name:

Slug:

Parent:

Description:

Since I have a TV Series Site, I want to add some more fields, I want something like this, when I create a new category (Category=Series)

Name:

Artist:

Year:

Type:

Genre:

Summary:

Slug:

Parent:

Description:

And so on...

Any help please? Thanks in advance.

I'd like to add custom fields to a certain category. A category only has the following fields:

Name:

Slug:

Parent:

Description:

Since I have a TV Series Site, I want to add some more fields, I want something like this, when I create a new category (Category=Series)

Name:

Artist:

Year:

Type:

Genre:

Summary:

Slug:

Parent:

Description:

And so on...

Any help please? Thanks in advance.

• categories

• possible duplicate of Any examples of adding custom fields to the category editor? – Jan Fabry Commented Feb 8, 2011 at 9:47
• Here is a cheat sheet I use when doing this. It has the relevant action hooks & filters in one short list. charlestonsw/… – Lance Cleveland Commented Feb 3, 2013 at 16:05

4 Answers 4

I posted an How To about it a week ago http://en.bainternet.info/2011/wordpress-category-extra-fields

hope this helps.

Ohad.

Here are the details of the post:

The first thing we need to do is add the extra fields to the category edit form using the hook edit_category_form_fields and we use a simple function that will print out the extra fields.

<?php
//add extra fields to category edit form hook
add_action ( 'edit_category_form_fields', 'extra_category_fields');

//add extra fields to category edit form callback function
function extra_category_fields( $tag ) {    //check for existing featured ID
    $t_id = $tag->term_id;
    $cat_meta = get_option( "category_$t_id");
?>
<tr class="form-field">
<th scope="row" valign="top"><label for="cat_Image_url"><?php _e('Category Image Url'); ?></label></th>
<td>
<input type="text" name="Cat_meta[img]" id="Cat_meta[img]" size="3" style="width:60%;" value="<?php echo $cat_meta['img'] ? $cat_meta['img'] : ''; ?>"><br />
        <span class="description"><?php _e('Image for category: use full url with '); ?></span>
    </td>
</tr>
<tr class="form-field">
<th scope="row" valign="top"><label for="extra1"><?php _e('extra field'); ?></label></th>
<td>
<input type="text" name="Cat_meta[extra1]" id="Cat_meta[extra1]" size="25" style="width:60%;" value="<?php echo $cat_meta['extra1'] ? $cat_meta['extra1'] : ''; ?>"><br />
        <span class="description"><?php _e('extra field'); ?></span>
    </td>
</tr>
<tr class="form-field">
<th scope="row" valign="top"><label for="extra2"><?php _e('extra field'); ?></label></th>
<td>
<input type="text" name="Cat_meta[extra2]" id="Cat_meta[extra2]" size="25" style="width:60%;" value="<?php echo $cat_meta['extra2'] ? $cat_meta['extra2'] : ''; ?>"><br />
        <span class="description"><?php _e('extra field'); ?></span>
    </td>
</tr>
<tr class="form-field">
<th scope="row" valign="top"><label for="extra3"><?php _e('extra field'); ?></label></th>
<td>
        <textarea name="Cat_meta[extra3]" id="Cat_meta[extra3]" style="width:60%;"><?php echo $cat_meta['extra3'] ? $cat_meta['extra3'] : ''; ?></textarea><br />
        <span class="description"><?php _e('extra field'); ?></span>
    </td>
</tr>
<?php
}

As you can see i added 4 new fields and all of them are in an array Cat_meta[key] because that way we only create on row in the options table to save all of the category's extra fields instead of a row for each field.

Next we need to save the extra fields in to the database once a user submits the category edit form and we do that using "edited_category" with a function that will run through each of the submitted fields and insert them to the database using the update_option function, like this:

<?php
// save extra category extra fields hook
add_action ( 'edited_category', 'save_extra_category_fileds');

// save extra category extra fields callback function
function save_extra_category_fileds( $term_id ) {
    if ( isset( $_POST['Cat_meta'] ) ) {
        $t_id = $term_id;
        $cat_meta = get_option( "category_$t_id");
        $cat_keys = array_keys($_POST['Cat_meta']);
            foreach ($cat_keys as $key){
            if (isset($_POST['Cat_meta'][$key])){
                $cat_meta[$key] = $_POST['Cat_meta'][$key];
            }
        }
        //save the option array
        update_option( "category_$t_id", $cat_meta );
    }
}

From the code above you can see that all of the extra fields we've added are stored in the database's options table with the name 'category_ID' , where ID is the id of the specific category we just edited and that means we can call this data in our plugins or theme files easily using the get_option function.

say for example my category id is 25 then my code will look like

<?php $cat_data = get_option('category_25'); ?>

As I stated in the beginning, I need to display a different image for each category, so in that case I added these few lines of code to my theme's category.php right after the code that displays the category title:

<?php
//first get the current category ID
$cat_id = get_query_var('cat');

//then i get the data from the database
$cat_data = get_option("category_$cat_id");

//and then i just display my category image if it exists
if (isset($cat_data['img'])){
    echo '<div class="category_image"><img src="'.$cat_data['img'].'"></div>';
}

Nice and easy and we are all done. The result should look similar to this:

As of Wordpress 4.4, the add_term_meta(), the update_term_meta() and get_term_meta() functions have been added. This means that the code as provided by MxmastaMills can be updated to use a far less hacky approach.

Here is my update of it. There is only one field as I wanted to add a custom title, but it'll work the same for all the fields you want to add.

function addTitleFieldToCat(){
    $cat_title = get_term_meta($_POST['tag_ID'], '_pagetitle', true);
    ?> 
    <tr class="form-field">
        <th scope="row" valign="top"><label for="cat_page_title"><?php _e('Category Page Title'); ?></label></th>
        <td>
        <input type="text" name="cat_title" id="cat_title" value="<?php echo $cat_title ?>"><br />
            <span class="description"><?php _e('Title for the Category '); ?></span>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <?php

}
add_action ( 'edit_category_form_fields', 'addTitleFieldToCat');

function saveCategoryFields() {
    if ( isset( $_POST['cat_title'] ) ) {
        update_term_meta($_POST['tag_ID'], '_pagetitle', $_POST['cat_title']);
    }
}
add_action ( 'edited_category', 'saveCategoryFields');

This code works:

add_action ( 'category_edit_form_fields', function( $tag ){
    $cat_title = get_term_meta( $tag->term_id, '_pagetitle', true ); ?>
    <tr class='form-field'>
        <th scope='row'><label for='cat_page_title'><?php _e('Category Page Title'); ?></label></th>
        <td>
            <input type='text' name='cat_title' id='cat_title' value='<?php echo $cat_title ?>'>
            <p class='description'><?php _e('Title for the Category '); ?></p>
        </td>
    </tr> <?php
});
add_action ( 'edited_category', function( $term_id ) {
    if ( isset( $_POST['cat_title'] ) )
        update_term_meta( $term_id , '_pagetitle', $_POST['cat_title'] );
});

Paul Menard provided an example of how to create and use term meta in his blog...
Custom meta for new taxonomies in WordPress 3.0.

There's no example of creating the DB table or checking $_POST vars are set, so you'll need to do those little things yourself, but it looks like a decent code base to build on top of ... :)