For better digital journalism, how to store a second title and excerpt?

Question

This is a digital journalism issue. As the technology evolves, digital journalism has found new best practises. One of them is to always write a predictive title, combined with a good excerpt. This predictive title, however, lacks that "x factor" that a non predictive title has. A great example is the news published by Time about Microsoft that will cut 18.000 jobs in the next year.

The proper title of the news is "Microsoft to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs", but on the home page the opening title was "Ctrl-Alt-Del". Simple, catchy.

So, we want to be able to create two titles and two excerpts inside a post. What should be the most effective and less resource consuming solution? Two meta values that I use only on the front-page.php?

I don't want to add to much weight to the post queries. Any pointers?

Answer 1

Custom fields are perfectly suited for this purpose. WP Ref. IF the metabox titled Custom Fields is not visible on your post edit screen, you may need to enable the view with the Screen Options menu at the top right of your editor.

For each post, simply create the secondary title and assign it a value.

Where you would like this information to display, (front-page.php template, based on your example) you are able to make use of pre-built WP functions such as the_meta() or get_post_meta() for output.

The meta_key is the name for your secondary title and meta_value is the actual title itself.

This method is useful for additional information you may also wish to input with each news post.

If you prefer a plugin over custom coding, I would recommend Elliot Condon's Advanced Custom Fields. This plug-in brings powerful features to non-developers with very little overhead. WP plugin directory link