get_post_meta in sitewide tags plugin fails to return value for custom fields

Question

Here's another conundrum that I'm toying with. There's a routine within the sitewide tags pages plugin which takes a list of custom fields (entered in the admin settings) and then uses these as keys to read a post and output the keys and values in an array. I have not been able to see it working and therefore I am trying to determine why.

Here's the routine within sitewide-tags.php: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/

*** line 369 in Version: 0.4.1.1 of sitewide-tags.php ***

$meta_keys = apply_filters( 'sitewide_tags_meta_keys', get_sitewide_tags_option( 'tags_blog_postmeta', array() ) );
    $global_meta['DEBUG TEST1'] = $meta_keys;
    $global_meta['DEBUG TEST2'] = $post_id;
if( is_array( $meta_keys ) && !empty( $meta_keys ) ) {
    foreach( $meta_keys as $key )
            $global_meta['DEBUG TEST3'] = 'custom loop';

        $global_meta[$key] = get_post_meta( $post->ID, $key, true );
}
unset( $meta_keys );

I have added a small amount of markup to reveal what is happening at each step.

For my test case, post_id #1121, there is one custom field which sits in the wp_9_postmeta table has one meta_key image with a corresponding meta_value http://newsite.com/files/2011/05/alfaP.jpg

However the routine returns no value within the function.

Here's what each of the debug tests shows;

DEBUG TEST1:

a:7:{i:0;s:11:"video-embed";i:1;s:9:"image-url";i:2;s:8:"link-url";i:3;s:10:"quote-copy";i:4;s:12:"quote-author";i:5;s:9:"quote-url";i:6;s:9:"audio-url";}

DEBUG TEST2: 1121
DEBUG TEST3: Custom Loop

So the first test (#1) shows that all the custom fields are being returned from the 'get_sitewide_tags_option' on line 1. The second test (#2) confirms it's looking at the correct post_id and the third test (#3) that it reaches the foreach loop and therefore passes the conditional clause.

EDIT: One further test is to check within the foreach loop and see what value is contained in $key - what I found is that $key contains the meta_key names (image, video-embed...) that should (in theory) be successful when used to retrieve the associated value using 'get_post_meta'.

I'd love to know why it doesn't - any ideas or suggestions?

Answer 1

I just solved a similar problem on a site I'm working on -- I couldn't get any meta values out of posts after I moved my loop code to a plugin.

Turns out that when you have a loop running from within a sitewide plugin, the way you access post meta is different.

Instead of writing this:

get_post_meta($post->ID, 'start-time', true);

you have to write this:

get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'start-time', true);

Note that first parameter, $post->ID changes to get_the_ID(). This fixed the problem for me, hopefully it does for you too!