title: how to display custom data from custom post types
body: <p>I've created a custom post type. It will load just fine in the Wordpress dashboard and I will be able to save it aswell. Now let's say it's a custom post type that contains data for a few strings and a few dates. </p>
  
  <p>I want to be able to retrieve these custom post types (which i've done using WP_Query and specifying the post_type to the name of my custom post type). When i call print_r on the returned object, nowhere in the object is the custom data (strings and dates) stored. How would i retrieve these from the database?</p>
  
  <p>I've looked around for hours and haven't found any approach to retrieving this data.</p>
  
  <p>As requested: This is how the data is stored:</p>
  
  <pre><code>function update_obituary(){
      global $post;
      update_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, "first_name", $_POST["first_name"]);
      update_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, "last_name", $_POST["last_name"]);
      update_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, "birth_date", $_POST["birth_date"]);
      update_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, "death_date", $_POST["death_date"]);
      update_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, "publication_date", $_POST["publication_date"]);
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This function is tied to the 'save_post' hook. The data will be redisplayed when i reopen the custom post type instance in edit mode. That means that it's stored in the database, right?</p>