Retrieving values using get_post_meta

Hi @tomwhita,

You haven’t posted the definition of your fields, but it appears you’re missing an underscore at the beginning of the field. Let us explain.

You have generally 2 ways of retrieving a post meta field:

1. Using get_post_meta()
2. Using the Carbon Fields function carbon_get_post_meta().

We recommend using the second one. Your code would then be:

<time>Start Date: <?php echo carbon_get_post_meta($post->ID, 'project_start_date'); ?></time>

and in case you still want to use get_post_meta(), you will have to prefix the field with an underscore, like this:

<time>Start Date: <?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, '_project_start_date', true); ?></time>

You might be wondering why the underscore prefix? Well, you’ve probably seen the default Custom Fields interface in WordPress? If you don’t prefix your post meta fields with an underscore, they will be shown in that interface as well. That is why most custom fields plugins add that prefix to their fields. And WordPress core also does that for internal post meta (like _thumbnail_id that is used for the post featured image).

Please, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks. This makes sense. I wasn’t able to find the answer in your docs. Was it in there? Perhaps I missed it.

I changed the code to your preferred solution and it works. I also added an esc_html. Below is the complete solution for showing a field value within a loop in case anyone is interested:

Assumes you’ve already fetched the posts:

<?php $yourfieldvariable = carbon_get_post_meta($post->ID, 'your_field_key'); echo esc_html( $yourfieldvariable ); ?>

Hi @tomwhita,

It appears you’ve missed it – it exists in the documentation. Basically there is a different data retrieval function for each container type – it can be found under the “Accessing field values” section in the documentation article of the corresponding container.

For example, you will easily notice it in the Post Meta container article in the documentation: https://carbonfields.net/docs/containers-post-meta/