WordPress 3.1 Admin Bar and I Can’t See Custom Fields!

Alright WP junkies, I hope you’ve been upgrading. I won’t dive too deep into nerdiness of how the WP core team has answered my prayers and added a lot of things like better support in WP Query for taxonomy queries and Custom Fields/Meta queries, let’s focus on the Oh, Shit! moments a few of my clients had today when I rolled some updates out.

I Can’t See My Custom Fields

I used custom fields a lot. Sometimes I create custom meta boxes for them, sometimes I have clients use the custom fields meta box directly. When we upgraded one of my client’s sites, my original administrator account still saw everything but the other accounts only saw the Publish, Page Attributes and title/editor panes in the Add/Edit Page screen.

Not cool. I was freaked. Then I realized (thanks to a support post at WordPress.org) that there are screen options there. They could’ve been there before and I just never paid attention, but now I know:

Hopefully that helps you out.

Killing the WordPress 3.1 Update Admin Bar

Don’t get me wrong. I get it. I like it. But I have some installs where we are leveraging WP accounts but don’t want to advertise to the user that we’re on WP. I’ve used it for some very interesting applications and customized some installs heavily (not core, of course) and some clients just freaked about it.

My preferred method, thanks to Joost de Valk, is to just to turn it off completely:

add_filter('show_admin_bar', '__return_false');

Remember, if you just want to hide it for yourself you can edit your user profile in the admin screens. Check out Joost’s article for more options. Happy double-you-peeing.

35 Comments

  1. Janto Djojo says…

    I can not see the custom field in the screen option. There are only:

    Author Categories Tags Comments Date

  2. Anon says…

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!

    You just saved me a whole lot of frustration! Woo hoo! Thanks!

    “Screen options” — Ugh.

  3. andy says…

    @Janto make sure you’re adding/editing a post and not on the main edit screen listing posts/pages.

    @Anon no problem, that’s the entire reason I post them!

  4. Vanessa says…

    Thank you so, so, sooo much, i just update my site and i was freaking out too, your post saved my life 😉

  5. xPat says…

    “Screen Options” 🙂 Many thanks mate!!!!!!

  6. monarch says…

    Dropped a bollock at the custom field disappearance to! What a relief to find your post. Nice one!

  7. Richard says…

    Bless you!!!

  8. Chinmay says…

    Thanks so much, this was a great help

  9. Grouch says…

    Thanks for the clue about the screen options 😉
    and also for the top admin bar thing…
    I started to doubt, but then I found your post

  10. Flavio Pacini says…

    OK guys, thanks a lot!. This is one of those thrifling things which can get you waste hours on them.

  11. Anand says…

    Had already disabled all the plugins and was thinking about going back to wordpress 3.0.5 to see if the fields would return. But after a Google search I ended up on this page. Thanks you, this saves a lot of time!

  12. Ritesh Reddy says…

    Thanks a heap Andy. I did freak out myself. Lucky for me, I found your blog post before I rolled WordPress forums for the same. Gracias Senor.

  13. andy says…

    All who found this post helpful: no problem! Glad it helped. This is why I post my litte freak outs and their solutions.

  14. egyptian-web-designer says…

    YOU ARE AMAZING THANK YOU SOOOOOOO MUCH
    form Egypt with love,
    Yehya

  15. pasang iklan says…

    hello… i still cannot view custom field even i checked it in the screen option… the custom field still dissapear… anyone knows why?

  16. Mike ferrari says…

    MAN!!! YOU’RE AMAZING!!! IT WAS SO OBVIOUS!

    From Poland with love.

  17. Widgia says…

    THANK YOU!!!, i was busy for 2 days to find the freaking custom fields, i was even starting to find plugins or php codes. You really saved me.

  18. Maddy says…

    Hi
    When I added the custom fields, i dont seem to be able to have 2 columns, it shows up as 2 columns but all the feature are below each other, even the save button and the categories…
    any idea what happened?

  19. andy says…

    @Maddy, I’m not sure… this could be some kind of problem with CSS or Javascript being output to the admin screens by your theme or one of your installed plugins…

  20. MiYon says…

    OMG Thank you!! I was going insane. I lost my custom fields after I updated WP and the theme I’m using depends on them.

  21. Stuart says…

    Many thanks!

  22. malistudio says…

    Same here. I thought I lost my custom fields. Silly, silly me. Thnx.

  23. joseph says…

    THANK YOU! this post helped me a lot I hate wordpress at times and it makes me feel like i should just code myself but this really helped me!

  24. andy says…

    @joseph what makes you hate WP?

  25. Kris says…

    +1 for Screen Options and custom fields. Thanks.

  26. SImon T. says…

    Thank. Very Helpful. Thought I had a problem with my database. You saved me from reinstalling wordpress.

  27. Enea says…

    I still can’t find custom fields.. I opened the screen options while editing a post and custom fields isn’t there. My WordPress installation is the latest 3.3. I just installed it a few days ago for a project I am working on and it isn’t the first time this happens to me, almost all of my updated 3.0 wp installations on my server don’t display custom fields at all!!

  28. andy says…

    Turn off all plugins, see if they return. Something could be mucking with your admin CSS or Javascript.

  29. Enea says…

    Did it and still nothing!

  30. andy says…

    Strange, I’m not sure at that point. Next thing I’d try is disabling all plugins and switching to TwentyEleven (theme) to see if they are still not able to be toggled.

  31. Heera says…

    Thanks a lot. May Allah bless you.

  32. reza says…

    thanks, you’ve just saved my day 🙂

  33. Senami Media says…

    Thanks a lot man, you just saved me a lot of time … Back to the superbowl now … Go Patriots.

  34. Princess says…

    Thanks so much for this post!!

  35. Ed Rai says…

    Thanks so much

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February 24, 2011

Filed in Development, Wordpress

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