Tom McFarlin

One of the things that I find myself trying to do on a regular basis is to streamline how I’m building WordPress-focused functionality. I’ve recently talked about this but thought I’d expand on it a little bit more.

That is, I thought I’d lay out the approach I take when building things such as custom post types, taxonomies, meta boxes, and so on.

Generally, think of this as a strategy that I follow for building out aspects of a project that interfaces directly with WordPress but may require a few components such as:

• classes that register themselves with WordPress through various hooks,
• classes that require calls to certain WordPress APIs
• and classes that require a custom view.

Sure, not every thing that interfaces with WordPress will need all of the above (for example, does a custom post type need a view? No. But a meta box does.)

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One of the things that I find consistently interesting (both from a programming standpoint and from a WordPress standpoint), is this:

I like keeping code separated such that code responsible for interacting with WordPress is relegated to its namespace while the rest of our code is namespaced appropriately elsewhere.

I think this is obvious, though.

When it comes to writing code, though, this doesn’t mean it has to be left simply to the how we write our classes and then organize them. What about things at a slightly more granular level?

That is, what if we were to look at methods as part of the larger whole and make sure they’re doing their job well, too? Sure, people like Bob Martin have been writing about this kind of stuff for the majority of their career and preaching it to people like us.

But these concepts are something that you simply start doing and then apply them for good. Paradigms shift, we’re better today than we were yesterday, and there may be multiple ways to achieve the same kind of thing.

So when it comes it comes to creating readable WordPress functions for a specific domain, what might that look like?

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