How to Publish WP original Source metabox value on front-end webpage

Question

I use a plugin called WP original Source.

It lets me add the URL of the original article source, which is handy as it credits the original source of article extracts and summaries that I publish of my website.

This URL is then published as metadata in the source code of my webpage, such as:

<meta name="original-source" content="http://www.abc.com.au/article.html">

However, I also want to publish this URL at the bottom of the article extract itself, so that users who read the article extract and want more information, can click the link and get taken to the original full article.

I can't work out how to do this however, being only a novice at php.

I did manage to code the following, however instead of getting the URLs, I get the word "array"

$originalsource = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), '_original_source', true);
echo $originalsource;

Can someone help me work out what php code I need to insert into the single.php form for the URL of the original source to be published as a visible URL, as well as the metadata statement?

Answer 1

get_post_meta is returning an array. Apparently, the plugin is saving _original_source as an array.

I don't know what that array looks like but instead of echo do print_r($original_source); and you get something that looks like:

Array
(
    [a] => apple
    [b] => banana
)

You can then do something like echo $original_source['a'] to print "apple".

Answer 2

From the plugin’s source code:

global $post;
$meta = get_post_meta($post->ID,'_original_source',TRUE);
$s1 = $meta['source1'];
$s2 = $meta['source2'];
$s3 = $meta['source3'];
$s4 = $meta['source4'];
$s5 = $meta['source5'];

So it saves up to 5 sources, and you can access these by the names source1 … source5 like this:

if ( $meta = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), '_original_source', TRUE) )
{
    $counter = 1;
    $sources = array();

    foreach( $meta as $source )
    {
        $url       = esc_url( $source );
        $sources[] = "<a href='$url'>Source $counter</a>";
        $counter  += 1;
    }

    print "<h3>Sources</h3><ul><li>" . join( "</li><li>", $sources ) . "</li></ul>";
}