Author: Tom (Page 53 of 428)

Structuring API Functionality (with a Separation of Concerns)

April 12, 2019 / Tom

I don’t have a lot of experience when it comes to creating APIs. I’ve done a fair share of work when it comes to integrating WordPress with third-party APIs, but I’ve spent very little time working on creating a system that has its API with which other systems can interact.

As far as the latter is concerned, I’m actually in the middle of doing that (and I’m learning a lot). The gist of the project is there’s an iOS app that’s interacting with WordPress via the REST API in a bi-directional way.

Structuring API Functionality: The WordPress REST API

I’m eager to share more about it, but I need to do so when the project is further along.

But when it comes to working with third-party APIs and then building components of a WordPress project that interact with them, two of the things I consistently find useful are:

using a proper library,
diagramming the system,
separating the functionality into parts.

And the last two points above are what I’m looking to cover in this post.

Code Reviews (That’s Alright)

April 10, 2019 / Tom

This episode published a little later than usual because of Spring Break, covers one of my favorite topics: code reviews.

Podcast Episode 4: Code Reviews

If you’re already a subscriber, then the episode should already be available on your app or service of choice. If not, look it up on any of the reviews linked below.

This episode features a multi-part answer for a multi-part question along with some info about WordCamp Atlanta and WordSesh.

A General Example of the Repository Pattern in WordPress

April 9, 2019 / Tom

In my experience, the way we first interact with the repository design pattern often influences how we think about the pattern. (The whole first impressions are lasting impressions, right?)

The purpose of this post is to show how it can be implemented in WordPress specifically when writing object-oriented plugins to read data (writing data may be covered in another post), but before doing that I tried to think of a few consistencies among the variations of the pattern that I’ve seen.

Generally speaking, this is what I think a repository pattern should do:

provide a single place to read data,
abstract the details of how the data is accessed,
and have a consistent interface for doing so.

This means that whatever it is you need to retrieve from the application can be retrieved from the database. But how its retrieved can be considered a black box. That’s up to the developer implementing the pattern.

And in the case for those who read this post, that’s most likely us.

Tools for Writing Better WordPress Code: Composer

April 4, 2019 / Tom

Although I think the title of this series and the articles for each are clear enough, there are other things I’m aiming to do with this series in contrast to the other series I’ve written up to this point, too.

Specifically, two of the things that I’m trying to do is to two:

keep each article relatively succinct (in comparison to how previous articles have been),
focus on one thing at a time and keep the description of it short.

Since this is membership content, I don’t mind it being a bit longer than usual, but I also don’t want it to be so long that it’s hard to follow. I’d rather it be a short read with something practical that you can implement after reading each post.

And one of the things that greatly helps with writing better WordPress code is Composer.

Finding the Destination of a Redirect with PHP

April 3, 2019 / Tom

Recently, I was working on a project that was communicating with a third-party API that, like many APIs, sends back a lot of data part of which includes a URL for the product associated with the API.

The thing about the API that was being returned was not the proper destination URL. Instead, it was a URL that ultimately redirected to another URL.

So imagine hitting, say, acme.site-info.com and having it direct to acme.com. We do this manually all the time, but I needed to get the actual – or the final – destination of the direct from the URL.

And finding the destination of a redirect with PHP is easy; however, this does assume there’s only a single redirect.

Nonetheless, here’s how to do it.