Programatically add metadata to user accounts in WordPress

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 fields 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.