How to echo value of a meta select box to the browser

Question

I got your “broken” code in your answer to work and will explain why. First, here’s the edited code that wasn’t working for you:

<?php

    //Get your post ID with a variable
    $this_post_id = get_the_ID();

    //Removed get function from get_post_meta to make functionality clearer
    //I tend to avoid nesting functions that are grabbing post information for easier debugging/reading
    //You need to use the field ID as the parameter in get_post_meta, what you had was the meta box id, not the field itself
    //Therefore WordPress didn't know what to retrieve since the metabox itself wasn't the custom meta you were grabbing
    $key_2_value =  get_post_meta( $this_post_id, 'custom_select', true );

    //Debugging got you an empty string before, uncomment this to see the results now
    //var_dump($key_2_value);

    if( ! empty( $key_2_value )) {
        //This works now - yay!
        echo $key_2_value;
    } ?>

The first thing I did was avoid nesting functions within functions so I made get_the_ID into a variable as well. It makes for easier reading and debugging should anything happen because then you can run var_dump on your variables piece by piece to confirm you’re getting all the information you need when troubleshooting.

Running var_dump on $key_2_value gave me an empty string. I ran var_dump on $this_post_id which was working for the post ID, cool, then I realized something.

I changed this:

get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'custom_meta_box', true );

To this:

get_post_meta( $this_post_id, 'custom_select', true );

If you look at your functions file, in your $custom_meta_fields definition, you gave the select box an ID of “custom_select”:

$prefix = 'custom_';    
$custom_meta_fields = array(
    array(
        'label'=> 'Map Icon',
        'desc'  => 'A description for the field.',
        'id'    => $prefix.'select', //right here!
        'type'  => 'select',
        'options' => array (
            'one' => array (
                'label' => 'Option One',
                'value' => 'three'
            ),
            'two' => array (
                'label' => 'Option Two',
                'value' => 'two'
            ),
            'three' => array (
                'label' => 'Option Three',
                'value' => 'three'
            )
        )
    )
);

So with get_post_meta, the $key parameter is the ID of the post meta field. And so you had the name of your meta box, custom_meta_box there instead of the name of the actual field itself. Once I changed that to custom_select, it worked.

Hope that helped! 🙂

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