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Post Metadata, Gutenberg, and SlotFills – Part 1

When I started writing this post, the idea behind it was going to be how to two things:

  1. Understand SlotFills in the context of WordPress and Gutenberg
  2. Create a SlotFill for introducing metadata

But the more I began writing, the more I recognized there’s a lot of material to cover. So in an attempt to write content that’s short, to the point, and practical (with the theory behind it coming later)

I thought I’d start with the first point and move to the next. The general idea behind what I want to do i sthis:

  • Provide a short introduction to SlotFills
  • Explain how to add your own SlotFill to WordPress
  • Save data from the user to the database (and verify it’s there)
  • Adding a column to display the post metadata in the All Articles view
  • Search the data just like you would titles and content
  • And then a short note about table prefixes

This is not a table of contents but a general guide of where I’m going with all of this. (Though feel free to bookmark this page.)

With that said, let’s started with a general introduction to SlotFills before going any further.

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Deactivating WordPress Plugins with SQL

If you inherit a WordPress codebase, regardless of the age of the project, there may be a lot of context that you don’t have as to why certain decisions were made or how things were implemented.

This may include the server, infrastructure used to help power the site or the app, and other contextual information about the environment in which it was running.

This type of information can be server-related information, PHP version, database type, information that’s actually stored in the database especially if you do a database import, and so on.

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Ideally, all of this is handed over but that’s not always the case. Anyway, say you attempt to start it up and then when you attempt to start up the application, not only does it not work but it either shows a white screen or displays a message about technical problems with your installation.

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How To Fix the Referenced PHPCompatibility Sniff Error

There are a lot of nice packages that we can use in our PHP-based projects and if you’re using Composer or GrumPHP, PHPCompatibility is one that I recommend including your projects especially if you’re writing code for something that’s going to run across multiple versions of PHP (that is, on hosts that offer different versions).

This is a set of sniffs for PHP CodeSniffer that checks for PHP cross-version compatibility. It will allow you to analyse your code for compatibility with higher and lower versions of PHP.

PHPCompatibility Repository

This is something that be installed within composer and it’s something that I recommend for people writing code for WordPress because of how much variation exists within our hosts.

Occasionally, though, you may see a problem like this:

And if you run $ phpcs -i you may get a message that’s unclear.

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Introducing Remove Empty Shortcodes

Last week, I discussed everything that went my decision on retiring site memberships. For those who were members (or even read the initial idea), you may recall that I was using Restrict Content Pro to power the site.

When retiring the memberships, I wanted to make sure I was able to maintain the integrity of all of the posts that I’d published simply without the shortcode that comes with RCP.

What started off as a simple plugin to remove the RCP shortcode turned into a plugin to remove all empty shortcodes. I’m opting to open the plugin’s repository so anyone can access it (or contribute issues, code, or create their own fork from it).

At the time of this writing, the plugin is at 0.4.0 so there’s not much to expect. But I enjoy reading the what and why other developers do in their projects, so I’m going to do so with Remove Empty Shortcodes.

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You Should Be Using PHP Filtering Functions, Part 2

In the previous post, I talked about the reasons using PHP filtering functions is more useful rather than not.

In short, doing so helps to provide a level of validation that’s built into the language so that we don’t have to re-write something. Naturally, there are caveats.

For example, if you’re having to validate a value that is of non-Latin characters, then you’re going to go have to go it alone and implement validation with perhaps a regular expression.

But if you’re using email addresses, URLs, numbers, IP addresses, and so many more things, then you’re in a good position to use something that already exists.

Anyway, all of the above is still about filtering variables. What about inputs, though? That is, those that come from $_POST or $_GET. It’s possible to use a similar strategy with a different function and different filter set.

But if you understand the basics presented in the last post, then this post will not be very different.

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