A media darling with serious geek appeal, Automattic quite expectedly makes my list of most-favorite-companies-in-the-world because they manage to combine extraordinary developer talent with a business model built around open source all the while maintaining blog, anti-spam, identity, wikis, forum software, and more via a world-wide spread of developer locations from Australia to Bulgaria. Talk about breaking the barriers of a normally prohibitive job market demographic… don’t let geography get in the way of hiring the most talented developers! I would love to hear more about Matt’s thoughts on his process for hiring such an amazing team. The Automattic outfit completely fascinates me.

Special thanks to Joseph Scott, Automattic’s brilliant “Bug Exorcist,” for organizing the lunch.

<?php
if (is_home()) {
   $description = "Default description of this website.";
   $keywords = "default, keyword, list";
} else {
   $description = get_post_meta($post->ID,'description',TRUE);
   $keywords = get_post_meta($post->ID,'keywords',TRUE);
}
if ($description) {
   echo "\\t<meta name=\"description\" content=\"$description\" />\\n";
   }
if ($keywords) {
   echo "\\t<meta name=\"keywords\" content=\"$keywords\" />\\n";
   }
?>

Here is another similar method:

<?php
  $pagetitle = get_post_meta($post->ID,'pagetitle',TRUE);
  $description = get_post_meta($post->ID,'description',TRUE);
  $keywords = get_post_meta($post->ID,'keywords',TRUE);
  if (empty($pagetitle)) {
    echo "<title>";
    wp_title('');
    echo " - ";
  } else {
    echo "<title>";
    if ($pagetitle!='') {echo "$pagetitle - ";}
  }
  bloginfo('name');
  echo "</title>";
  if (!empty($description)) {
    echo "\\t<meta name=\"description\" content=\"$description\" />\\n";
  }
  if (!empty($keywords)) {
    echo "\\t<meta name=\"keywords\" content=\"$keywords\" />\\n";
  }
?>

Other meta tags, like character set, are hard coded into the main header.php code because they are the same on every page.

You can find more information about Using Custom Fields on wordpress.org. There are several meta plugins listed on wordpress.org, and a search for custom fields plugins wordpress on Google will return even more options.