Besides my full time regular job, these days I’m working on a community site for a friend of mine. Good knows if it will ever come to life However, here’s a little something some of you might find useful. I needed to develop and export quite a large amount of users from a database of some other system into WordPress system. Among other things I needed to attach quite a few custom metadata fields to each and every user. WordPress already comes with function for creating/updating user metadata.

What I needed is a bit modified version, the one that receives an array of key values as metadata fields. Here is my tweak on how to do it.

/**
*
* @param int $userId
* @param array $data array of key values
*/
public function addMetaData2User($userId = 0, $data = array())
{
if(($userId > 0) && (!empty ($data)))
{
echo ‘<ul>’;
foreach ($data as $key => $val)
{
if(update_usermeta($userId, $key, $val))
{
echo ‘<li>Added key <strong>’.$key.’</strong> with value <strong>’. $val .’</strong>’;
}
}
echo ‘</ul>’;
}
}

Just place this inside one of your custom classes or anywhere you prefer.

So if you would like to add the fileds like “am_i_cool”, “total_points” and so on, then all you need to do is something like

$data = array( “am_i_cool” => “yes”, “total_points” => “8″);

addMetaData2User( $someUserIdNumberHere, $data );

Hope some of you find this useful.