Category: Notes (Page 35 of 50)

When it comes to working with remote requests on the server side, there are usually two solutions that I end up seeing.

In fact, there are two solutions that I’ve typically ended up using:

• file_get_contents
• cURL

Both of these functions generally work well; however, in our experience with Standard, we’ve had less than stellar experience especially when it comes to budget hosts.

This is where wp_remote_get comes into play. In short, wp_remote_get is a simple WordPress API function that’s used to retrieve data from a specified URL using the HTTP GET method.

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The title of this post is somewhat misleading as I’m not actually sharing how to programmatically populate a WordPress template – instead, I’m walking through the process of populating a page that also has a page template applied to it.

Anyway, creating WordPress templates is easy business:

• Create the template file in the theme directory
• Give the template file the proper header comments
• Fill out the template with the proper markup

Back in March, I shared a proof-of-concept plugin for including a template file in a plugin. If you browse through the comments, note that there’s a lot of discussion on how to do it, why one way is better than the others, and so on.

But as I’ve continued to work on a project in which I include templates in plugins, I’ve also been working on populating template-based pages with content from HTML files.

Here’s how I’ve been working to programmatically populate a WordPress template.

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Up until this point, I’ve never worked on a project or done any type of work that required a custom post type to be added to an existing menu in the WordPress dashboard.

For the most part, I’m generally of the mindset that custom post types should:

• Exist as top level menus
• Should be added at the bottom of the WordPress dashboard menu

This mentality is primarily motivated by the fact that I see the core WordPress menu options as first-class citizens in the dashboard, custom post types as being second-class citizens.

That’s just a rule of thumb, though. There are always exceptions.

But there are also times where custom post types could be treated as, say, third-class citizens where they should be integrated with an existing menu be it a core menu or another custom post type menu.

Luckily, it’s trivially easy to add a custom post type as a menu item to an existing menu.

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