Custom Fields

Last updated:
May 25, 2026

Beyond the title and body, most content carries extra fields — a product’s “vintage year,” an event’s location, a custom attribute your theme reads. Maxi can read and write all of it.

WordPress stores a lot of information as metadata (“meta” for short) — the custom fields attached to your content beyond its main title and body. A product might carry a custom “material” or “warranty length” field; a post might store a subtitle or a layout option; fields added by plugins like Advanced Custom Fields live here too. The Custom Fields capability lets your agent read and write these values.

“Custom fields” and “meta” are the same thing — “meta” is WordPress’s technical term, “custom fields” is what you usually see in the editor. This page uses them interchangeably.

Reading and writing fields

The agent can work with any field on a piece of content:

  • Get a single field’s value, or list all the fields and values on an item — useful for discovering what custom data something carries.
  • Set a field — add it if it’s missing, or update it if it exists.
  • Delete a field.

“What custom fields does this product have?”
“Set the ‘vintage_year’ field on this wine to 2019.”

When setting values, you give the agent the plain value you want stored — it handles the technical formatting WordPress expects, so you don’t have to think about how the data is encoded under the hood.

Not just posts: terms and users too

A point worth knowing — custom fields don’t only live on posts and products. The same capability reaches three kinds of object:

  • Posts (and pages, products, any content type) — the most common case.
  • Terms — extra data attached to a category, tag, or custom term (for instance, a custom field on a product category).
  • Users — fields stored against a user account.

So “set a field” works whether the thing you’re describing is an article, a category, or a person’s profile.

Doing it in bulk

For applying field values across many items, the agent can bulk-update fields — setting one or more field/value pairs across a whole set of objects in one pass, rather than item by item. For variable products it can even expand a change across all of a product’s variations at once.

“Set the ‘brand’ field to ‘Acme’ on every product in the ‘Tools’ category.”

What it’s good for

  • Filling in structured data — populating the custom fields your theme or plugins rely on, across your catalog or content.
  • Discovering what’s there — listing an item’s fields to understand what custom data it carries.
  • Bulk field passes — applying a value across many items or all a product’s variations at once.
  • Working with terms and user data — not just post content.

In summary: Custom Fields (meta) is how your agent reads and writes the structured data attached to your content — get, set, list, and delete fields, and bulk-update them across many items at once. It reaches posts, terms, and users alike, and you give plain values while Maxi handles the technical formatting. It’s the capability behind populating and maintaining the custom data your site and its plugins depend on.

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