Having trouble finding info on this. When working with lots of metadata/custom fields, I would really prefer to simplify getting the meta data inside of templates instead of using get_post_meta and instead keep the setting up of that data in the back-end where it belongs to keep my templates clean and easier to work with.
Is there a way to do this?
<p><?php echo $something->meta_field_name ?></p>
This would be similar to how you can do things like $post->ID or $post->post_parent that are in WordPress core, except it would be for custom post types and custom fields. If this is not possible, I guess the next question would be, why?
Edit: Since I’ve seen this mentioned several times in responses, when writing PHP like this you have to escape the output, which I do. I left out the escaping for brevity, but for anyone new to it, here’s how I would typically write this (and thanks to @fuxia for the solution to my original question).
Escaping (with the solution) for WordPress:
<p id="text-<?php echo esc_attr($post->post_name) ?>"><?php echo esc_html($post->meta_key_name) ?></p>
And if you’re outputting to a class:
<p class="text-<?php echo sanitize_html_class($post->post_title) ?>">Clean Class</p>
I typically wouldn’t use post_title but using it as an example as sanitize_html_class will remove white space and only keep alphanumeric characters, underscores and dashes.
If outputting things like JSON-LD, you can combine escaping:
"@id": "<?php echo esc_js(esc_url($link)) ?>#<?php echo esc_js($post->post_name) ?>",
"name": "<?php echo esc_js($post->post_title) ?>"
1
Getting meta data from a WP_Post object is already possible. Just write:
echo $post->your_meta_key;
This will call get_post_meta( $this->ID, $your_meta_key, true ) behind the scenes.
See the documentation and the source code for WP_Post.
This works also with instances of WP_User, but not with WP_Comment as far as I know.
Don’t forget to escape the output!