Which method is best for retrieving information from custom fields in a Wordpress post to be displayed on another page?

Question

I'm a PHP beginner working with Wordpress, and I'm trying to retrieve data from custom fields (using Custom Field Suite) from a post to be displayed on a different page.

I have tried a few different ways, and found two methods that work. But as I'm a beginner, I wonder if these methods are 'proper'?

This is one solution I found, but it's not exactly elegant:

// Method 1
$current = CFS()->get( 'get_current' ); //retrieves the post ID from a custom field on the page
$custom_fields = get_post_custom($current);
$my_custom_field = $custom_fields['current_title'];
$my_custom_field2 = $custom_fields['current_artist'];

foreach ( $my_custom_field as $key) {
}
foreach ( $my_custom_field2 as $key2) {
}

echo '<h2>'.$key.'</h2>';
echo '<h1>'.$key2.'</h1>';

I tried to re-write it like this, but nothing is displayed - not sure what's wrong with this loop:

// Method 2
$current = CFS()->get( 'get_current' ); 
$custom_fields = get_post_custom($current);

foreach ( $custom_fields as $key) {

echo '<h2>'.$key['current_title'].'</h2>';
echo '<h1>'.$key['current_artist'].'</h1>';
}

As method 2 wasn't working, I tried something else and found that this also works (I added the loop here based on this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19918170/5483154 ):

 // Method 3
 <?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
 $current = CFS()->get( 'get_current' );
 $currentitle = get_post_meta($current, 'current_title', true);
 $artistname = get_post_meta($current, 'current_artist', true);

 echo '<h2>'.$currentitle.'</h2>';
 echo '<h1>'.$artistname.'</h1>';

 endwhile;
 wp_reset_query();
 ?>

Method 3 seems best to me. Is this a good way of approaching this problem? And if anyone would be kind enough to explain what's wrong with method 2, I would also appreciate it. Thanks

Answer 1

Looking at the Custom Field Suite documentation here: http://customfieldsuite.com/api/get.html

It looks like you should be using the 'get' method:

CFS()->get( $field_name, $post_id, $options );

Eg.

$current = CFS()->get( 'get_current' );     

echo '<h2>' . CFS()->get( 'current_title', $current ) . '</h2>';
echo '<h1>' . CFS()->get( 'current_artist', $current ) . '</h1>';

Ps. Don't forget to watch the order of your heading tags ( <h1> should come before <h2> )

Answer 2

In the case of your "method 2": what if you try rewriting it something like this?

// Method 2
$current = CFS()->get('get_current');
$custom_fields = get_post_custom($current);

foreach ($custom_fields as $field) {
    foreach ($field as $key => $value) {
        echo $key . ': ' . $value;
    }
}