So awkwardly realised I’d been going about this whole thing in a stupid roundabout way and in fact Milo above in the comments is completely right, and proves that the codex still has secrets for everyone, or maybe just me.
The eureka (or durr-eka) moment came after reading this post here about setting up and editing the content of the metaboxes.
Instead of calling the individual meta to be edited using get_post_meta
I used the get_post_custom()
and simply cycled through every post meta entry using a foreach
loop and a simple isset
form for each generated.
Apologies for the obvious question but thought I’d answer it myself rather than delete it in case anyone else out there is doing it wrong too.