Despite my appearance on Vlad's site and the technical issues of the code above (and my fancy comment) I still have much to learn. Your points are well made (and have sunk in for future reference) and I will eventually have to learn how to make plugins from some of these more lengthy code additions.

I was actually going to download Vlad's book in Ebook format soon (I live in Chile, might take a while to arrive in the normal post).

Anyway, thanks again.

Personally, I prefer using plugins because the functionality is not locked-up in a theme's functions.php file. That allows me to change themes for looks and also for problem solving.

Yes, plugins can conflict with each other and cause problems with functionality and with CSS.

For custom coding, I recommend following Vladimir's book and write your own plugins instead of adding more code into functions.php you'll also gain portability by being able to reuse those plugins for other clients.

Just to let you know -

I choose to go for 'custom fields' as opposed to 'excerpts' because this piece of code was only the beginning of a larger puzzle.

The customer had a travel website and wanted to display all-sorts of information at various points around his site - as you can image a travel company having.

By using 'custom-fields' I was able to call on the 'keys' and the 'values' at a later date to make pages dynamically.

For example - if the 'key' for this display box was 'forthcoming trips' and he entered dates on individual pages, that means I could make him a page called "All Upcoming Trips" that was 'self building' by displaying the appropriate 'key' and 'value' by using 'get_post_custom_values' and 'get_post_custom_keys'.

Please excuse my poor terminology, it was a while since I made this particular modification.

Also, I tried various plugins to get the job done, but none did exactly what I wanted and one clashed with Cforms ii and the site went down (I opted for the Cforms plugin due to all the enquiry forms on the website). Always remember the less plugins a site has the better.

Hope this clears things up.

I used the code tag...
Do we use the pre tag?

Here it is again:

And, just in case, here it is, with all the angle brackets removed.

?php if ( get_meta(FloatOnOff) == on ) { ?
div class="FloatParagraph"
?php meta(FloatText) ; ?
/div
?php } ?

Anyway, the end resulting functionality is basically the same, but using the excellent "More Fields" plugin to automatically do what you spent a whole lot of time and coding doing. I guess if you're anti-plugin-clutter (or pro-hand-writing-a-lot-of-geeky-code), your way is better. But this is how I would do it (in fact, I've used this basic tool for dozens of similar applications).

Using the "more fields" AWESOME plugin:

Create a new edit box. Let's call it "Floating Paragraph." We'll add two new input fields fields: A checkbox called "Using Floating Paragraph?" (Key: "FloatOnOff") and a text area called "Floating Paragraph Text" (Key: "FloatText").

Go into the single.php template (or wherever else you want this to show up), and inside the loop, just before the code that creates the title, insert:

That's it. Go add some css, and spend two weeks doing something else.

Your method is quite complex in comparison. It helped me learn alternative methods!

Thanks for sharing.