Display Random Adverts in WordPress with Custom Fields

Posted on 15. Jul, 2009 by Alex Denning in Quick Tips

Whilst building the exciting new version of Nometech (to be launched very, very soon!) [update - it has launched, this is it!], I needed a way of displaying a random 300×250 advert in the sidebar. After a bit of Google-ing to no avail, something came to me –  ‘why not use custom fields?!‘. Really, why not! In this post I’ll show you how to display a random advert in WordPress using custom fields and a couple of posts you’ve already written.

First thing to do is to upload the adverts you want to display to your theme’s folder /images. With that done, assuming you have three adverts you want to rotate, find three posts and add them to a category ‘Adverts’. Then, in each of the three posts, add a different advert to the custom field ‘Advert’. The image below shows what I mean – add the HTML link and image:

With that done to all three posts, now comes the code, which you can add where-ever to your theme, but I’d suggest in the sidebar.php file.

[php]<?php $my_query = new WP_Query(‘category_name=Adverts&showposts=1&orderby=rand’); ?>

<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Advert", true); ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>[/php]

And that’s that. Any queries leave a comment below.

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Tags: Custom Fields

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