WordPress Custom Fields and Checking for Values

I have been building sites with WordPress for about a year now and I love it. I love the versatility that WordPress offers and I have had great success with Search Engine Visibility. I just recently read a great article on how to use custom fields to take your wordpress site to the next level.

I setup a few pages on my site StamfordCTGuide, which one section in particular, hotels. I added a few hotels and ran into some issues of missing images. Instead of adding the missing images image to each custom field entry in Admin. I wrote a little php if statement to check to see if there is a value present, and if there isnt – to show a default “no image available”.

Here is the php that I wrote, its simple – but really my first experience with writing php. I have been doing ActionScript 3 for about 6 months, and the basic principles are the same.

			<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><img src="<?php
			if ($hotels_img != null) {
			echo $hotels_img[0];
			}
			else if ($hotels_img == null) {
			echo "http://www.stamfordctguide.com/wp-content/themes/stamfordctguide/images/noimage.gif";
			}

			?>" border="0" width="50"></a>