Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 21 of 427)

A Beginner’s Guide to Querying the Slack API

Creating Slack applications can be as time-consuming and complex as writing any other type of application. What if you’re interested in querying the Slack API for your workspace and incorporating the results in a WordPress plugin? Here’s how you can get started.


Ultimately, all we need to make queries to the Web API is an OAuth token and a REST API client to make requests. From there, it’s a matter of programmatically implementing the functionality in your code.

But that’s not at what we’re aiming. Instead, this article is more about learning how to make requests to the Slack API and what’s required to get set up to do so.

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Using Ray in WordPress Development: An Example of Classic Debugging

TL;DR: This final article will demonstrate how to use Ray in WordPress as an example of classic debugging.

No, it’s not the same as something such as Xdebug, but it demonstrates what we can do such as changing variables on the fly and changing the course of execution.


⚠️ If you’ve not already set up your environment, please read this post and make sure you have the free version of Ray installed.

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Quick Tip: Find WordPress Users by Metadata

TL;DR: Here’s how you can use SQL to find WordPress users by metadata. This is useful when you have information such as their first name and last name and want to retrieve the full WP_User.


WordPress provides a number of functions that make it easy to retrieve a user based on certain information. One of the most popular functions (or most useful, maybe?) is get_user_by.

However, what if you’re working on a system that maintains the user’s first name and last name or some other type of data point in the usermeta table and you want to use that to retrieve the user’s information?

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Quick Tip: Programmatically Authenticate a User

TL;DR: Here’s how you can programmatically authenticate a user into WordPress as long as you have a verified user ID for said user.


Earlier this week, I shared how to import necessary core files to programmatically manage users in the administration area of WordPress. Along those same lines, if you’re working with a third-party service for login and authentication, it may be useful to know how to programmatically redirect to the administration area once you have a valid user ID.

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