Changing columns on the job dashboard of WP Job Manager

If you stumbled upon this post because you’re trying to change the columns on the job dashboard of WP Job Manager, scroll to the bottom for some code. Also, good luck!

Otherwise, join me for a small story.

Today I created my first gist. What’s a gist you ask?

Well… it’s basically a block of code shared with the world.

Let’s take a step back and I’ll explain.

As a developer, I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to do something. On a most recent project, I needed to change the columns on the job dashboard of WP Job Manager.

I searched the documentation and found code to remove a column, but nothing to add a column (let alone populate one).

Emailing support led me a bit further down the path — they gave me a link to a snippet of code that allowed me to add, rename and remove columns. Helpful, but I also needed to show the columns in a specific order and populate those columns.

Time to get creative. Part of being good at troubleshooting is trying different search terms. I searched MANY different phrases until I found some code that seemed to populate a column. That specific code didn’t work for me because it referenced WooCommerce products (which I don’t have), but it did spark a few ideas.

I played around with it for awhile. What would I get if I printed the post array to the screen? Ooh, the job ID — win!

Now to find the rest of the data in post meta. More searching, testing, trial and error and finally I got it.

All of the articles I found during my research helped, so I wanted to share my code with the world with the hope that someone else will find it useful.

So, if you need to change the columns on the [job_dashboard] of WP Job Manager, try this.

If you rely on others when trying to figure something out, consider giving back and publishing a summary of a problem you solved.

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