RW Meta Box ,Problem setting post title

Question

I'm using RW_Meta_Box plugin by Rilwis.

I'm using a CPT and added a custom meta-box and removed the title and editor.

But I still want to set the title for some obvious reasons.

I created the CPT and meta-box and everything worked perfectly including the all posts page using custom column hooks.

As soon as I sat to set post title to one of the fields in the meta-box, I failed to get the desired results.I tried to solutions I picked by searching through this Q&A site.

Initially I tried:

SOLUTION1:

add_action('submitpost_box', 'hidden_type_title');

function hidden_type_title() {
    global $current_user, $post, $post_type;
    global $prefix;
    $md = rwmb_meta($prefix . 'name', array('type' => 'text'), $post->ID);
    if ($post->post_type == 'MY_CPT_NAME') {
    ?>
    <input type="hidden" name="post_title" value="<?php echo esc_attr(htmlspecialchars($md)); ?>" id="title" />
    <?php
    } else {
    return;
    }
}

The above code works fine but it has a problem I am unable to detect. which is, I need to update the post twice to set the post title.

Therefore I went on to try the save_post hook like so:

SOLUTION2:

add_action('save_post', 'post_updated');

function post_updated($post_id) {
    global $current_user, $post;
    if ($post->post_type != 'MY_CPT_NAME') {
    return;
    }

    global $prefix;
    $md = rwmb_meta($prefix . 'name', array('type' => 'text'), $post_id);
    // verify post is not a revision & not an autosave
    if (!wp_is_post_revision($post_id) && !(defined('DOING_AUTOSAVE') && DOING_AUTOSAVE)) {
    // set the new post title
    $post->ID = $post_id;
    $post->post_title = $md;

    // update the post, removing the action to prevent an infinite loop
    remove_action('save_post', 'post_updated');
    wp_update_post($post);
    add_action('save_post', 'post_updated');
    return;
    }
}

Now, I'm in a worse situation, the post title is instantly set but my meta-box data is somehow not being saved.

What might be wrong with the first solution?

Answer 1

Here's a solution that take's advantage of Rilwis' action hook... so you can profit from his nonce checking without needing to add your own.

add_action('rwmb_after_save_post', 'post_updated');

function post_updated($post_id) {

    // verify post is not a revision & not an autosave
    if (!wp_is_post_revision($post_id) && !(defined('DOING_AUTOSAVE') && DOING_AUTOSAVE)) {

    global $prefix;
    $prefix . 'name';

    // check that the custom field is being POSTED 

    if( isset( $_POST[$prefix . 'name'] ) ){    
        $my_post = array();
        $my_post['ID'] = $post_id;
        $my_post['post_title'] = sanitize_title( $_POST[$prefix . 'name'] );

        // Update the post into the database
        wp_update_post( $my_post );   

        }

    }
}

To limit this function to only run for a specific metabox, you could use this add_action instead:

add_action("rwmb_{$meta_box['id']}_after_save_post", 'post_updated');

Without seeing your metabox definitions, I don't know what to change the ID to, so you will have to do that.

NB: Untested, but I think it is close. Please see wp_update_post() in the codex for how that function works.