Tag: WordPress (Page 116 of 219)

When The Customizer (once called The Theme Customizer) became part of WordPress, we saw a resurgence in the Theme Modification API.

At one point in WordPress history, the get_theme_mod and set_theme_mod was how we handled theme modifications (hence the function names). Then, we began to use the options table as a way to manage the various settings for our plugins.

And then we began to use the options table as an easy to way to store settings for our themes. It was like we moved the Theme Modification API to the backseat and pushed forward with options.

Should we have done that (or does it even matter)? And what’s the difference in these APIs, anyway? Why do we still have both of them, which is best to use and when?

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When working with Ajax in WordPress, the general setup is pretty straightforward:

1. Register the `ajaxurl`, if needed
2. Define the hooks (or the callbacks) on the server-side
3. Register and Enqueue the JavaScript files
4. Have your JavaScript file(s) call to the defined server-side hooks
5. Update the front-end as necessary

And the front-end may refer to the Dashboard, the public-facing part of the blog, or the both. It depends on the nature of what you’re working on.

If you’ve worked with Ajax in WordPress in-depth for any amount of time, then you’re likely familiar with the above process. You’re also familiar with the challenges of maintenance depending on how the code was setup.

If you’re just getting started, then perhaps this post will help shortcut some of the learning the rest of us have had to do.

I don’t think the Ajax APIs are that bad. I know – this is subjective. But from the a maintenance standpoint I believe that there’s at least one thing we can do to make development and maintenance easier.

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One of the features people tend to love or hate (or simply accept) about writing PHP scripts is how you can mix general constructs of the language – such as conditions – with functions outside of any type of class, namespace, or container.

Bringing a Little Order to the Chaos

That is, you can write conditional logic that exists within the global namespace right alongside functions that aren’t part of anything other than the global namespace, as well. This can make for difficult code to maintain.

But the point of this post isn’t to complain – for what it’s worth, I see it as the nature of the language, accept it for what it is, try to avoid it, and work with it whenever something comes across my desk. I’m far less dogmatic about that kind of stuff than I used to be when I first started working as a developer, but I digress.

Anyway, this post is tagged as “WordPress” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, however the purpose of doing so is because I was recently working on an older WordPress-based site that was using Ajax, it wasn’t doing so using the built-in API, and it was basically using Ajax to call a vanilla PHP script.

As such, I thought I’d write a bit about as how it’s still possible to refactor code like this so it’s a little more maintainable even if it’s using a style of coding with which we don’t necessarily like to use.

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