How to prevent meta data from being edited in a post?

Question

I need to add a 'poll' to every single post automatically, and wish to do this without having to manually create a poll each time using a plugin, so I had an idea to store the poll results as meta data in the post. So each time someone votes, it saves their vote as a custom field meta value in the post.

This should work in theory, however one problem I've discovered early on is that when editing the post which contains a poll, if someone votes while I am editing and then I press Update, the results are reset back to whatever they were before I started editing, because the custom field is being saved along with the post.

Is there any way to stop a certain custom field from being saved when I update a post? Or to make it retrieve the latest value before saving it?

Answer 1

I would recommend you to remove custom fields meta box from the post editing page. You can do it by using remove_meta_box() function.

add_action( 'admin_menu' , 'wpse8170_remove_post_custom_fields' );
function wpse8170_remove_post_custom_fields() {
    remove_meta_box( 'postcustom' , 'post' , 'normal' ); 
}