Wordpress - Making the backend more user friendly. Custom fields? - html

Question

I'm developing a Wordpress website for a client based on Avada-theme and am a little worried, that the client is likely to mess up formatting and styling when being confronted with the standard back-end + WYSIWYG editor.
Let's take the URL: http://www.consilio-suedwest.de/angebote/ as an example.
So this is what the code looks like in the text view inside the first content box:
Die Zukunft aktiv und erfolgreich gestalten
Instead of having the client to edit the content boxes, I would like to display simply a text only field with a small description like "content box 1" in which the client can type in plain text.
Then this plain text would have to be transported with some kind of shortcode into the correct place.
So it would have to be something like.
[[plain text here]]
I don't know if something like this exists or what options I have to create a functionality like this. I did some research and, of course, stumbled upon custom fields, but it seems like I have to get into editing php.files and stuff which I don't want to do.
Appreciate your help

Answer 1

Take a look at the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. It has greatly helped me with improving the UI experience for WordPress admins.
It allows you to create a wide variety of custom fields, and has an extensive filtering feature to place the fields only on the pages/posts you want. For example, if you had a "Services" page, and several pages that were children of Services, you could create a "Services Description" text field that only displays on pages with Services as its' parent.
If you made a text field called "services_description" in your php code, you would call the value of the field using this:
<h3><?php the_field('services_description'); ?></h3>
If you wanted to check if the field had a value before drawing the tag, you'd do this:
<?php if(get_field('services_description')){ ?>
<h3><?php the_field('services_description'); ?></h3>
<?php } ?>
You can use many different field types, with their own settings. A sampling of the fields are:
Text Field
WYSIWYG Editor
Image Field
Gallery
Repeater
Color Picker
and many more.
They also have a great support/documentation system on their website, so you can learn how to utilize all of the various fields.
Sure, you could hand-code custom fields to your site, and there's plenty of tutorials out there to do that, but ACF is great for rapid deployment of custom content, so I'd really recommend it. They have a free and a paid version, but you should be fine with the free version.
I just noticed your last line about not wanting to edit php files. That is going to be extremely tricky in almost any solution to this. There are ways that you can hook into the_content() to alter what goes in it, but even that would still require altering your functions.php file.