Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 110 of 428)

Sending Secure Ajax Requests in WordPress (with Nonces)

I know that the REST API is a huge topic of conversation in WordPress right now, and rightfully so, but there are still times in which we have to use admin-ajax (as its coming to be known) for a variety of reasons.

  • Perhaps it’s an application,
  • Perhaps time doesn’t allow for creating the necessary endpoints,
  • Perhaps you’re more comfortable with admin-ajax,
  • And so on.

Regardless of your reasons for why you use it (which I still do, for whatever that’s work), I think it’s important to make sure we’re sending secure Ajax requests in WordPress using nonces just as you would if you were submitting traditional form data.

Secure Ajax Requests in WordPress

Legitimate, live shot of wires carrying your Ajax request.

If you search the web for results on how to do that, you’ll come up with a variety of answers, and this will be just another drop in the proverbial bucket.

But if you’re curious for a recipe for how to handle it, this is how I do it each time.

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So When Do We Update Out-of-Date Blog Posts?

Late last week, a good friend of mine linked me to a post I wrote earlier this year.

Out-of-Date Blog Posts

Do we update out of date blog posts?

If you opt not to read the post, the short of it is this:

  • tt’s about a plugin bootstrap file,
  • and there’s a discussion in the comments about it.

Here’s the thing: The more work you do with a given set of tools, the more you’re going to learn and the greater your skills are going to get.

So the posts that you’ve written become a bit out of date. Are we then recommending bad advice? Ultimately, this raises the question of what do we do with blog posts that may be out of date?

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Rapid Prototyping: Introducing Autoloading

Over the last few posts, I’ve walked through the process of taking an idea from concept to prototype.

Granted, there are some things that you might change (and there are some things I’d change regarding organizing classes). But the point of the series isn’t to walk through all of the various object-oriented techniques that can be used to create a solution.

Instead, it’s about taking a prototype and converting it into something a little more professional. There’s still one thing that we need to do, though.

Right now, we include all of our files through require statements. And this works alright for small files, but introducing autoloading in conjunction with namespaces can make the application even cleaner.

And that’s what we’re going to do.

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Rapid Prototyping: Prototype To Code, Part 2

The previous post demonstrates a lot of work in taking something that was once a rapid prototype and taking that prototype to code. If you haven’t been following along, we’ve done the following:

  1. talked about and built a prototype for a plugin,
  2. diagrammed out one object-oriented approach may work,
  3. and refactored our prototype to actual code.

At this point, there are a few more things we can do to improve our code. Namely, we can introduce the concept of namespaces. This takes the organization a step further and can pay dividends for larger projects.

So here’s a look at how this plays out in our current project.

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Rapid Prototyping: Prototype To Code, Part 1

As far as rapid prototypes and WordPress are concerned, we’ve done two things thus far:

  1. planned the plugin,
  2. sketched out a diagram for how the code can be organized

At this point, we’ve done enough work to warrant beginning to refactor our code. That is, we’re going to start converting the prototype to code. But this is something that’s going to need to be done in two phases.

First, we’re going to simply introduce classes that represent the diagrams from the previous post and that encapsulate the responsibility of each project.

After that, we’ll look at organizing the code into namespaces and packages. Before we can do that though, we need to make sure the code is object-oriented and remains functional. So that’s what’s going to happen in this post.

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