Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
I’m currently working on an application that requires users to register before logging into the site. The application is based on WordPress, but the registration process is using a custom template and requires some extra information.
As an example, I thought I’d share how I’m programmatically creating a user during the registration process, adding extra information to the user’s profile, and then displaying it in the user management dashboard.
I’ve done my fair share of work with WP_Query this week – it’s definitely been an exercise in education, but when an employee of Automattic comments and offers advice, it’s worth listening
But I wanted to keep the conversation going for the benefit of other developers.
As such, I wanted to reblog this talk by lead WordPress developer and Audrey Capital technologist Andrew Nacin in which he discusses the various topics surrounding WordPress queries, hooks, and so on in order guide others in understanding WP_Query.
For those who are experienced with the Settings API, you may wish to skip down to the core problem.
I’m currently building a web application where WordPress is serving as the core framework. I’ve discussed this before and Matt covered this in State of the Word 2012 as something that will become more common as WordPress grows in popularity.
So WordPress doesn’t necessarily have an MVC or MVVM or whatever design pattern, but it offers its own method for how data models, business logic, and other necessary components should be created.
I’m using the Settings API to create a model that represents a user in the application. Essentially, it will wrap the core WordPress user model, but I have to introduce some additional attributes and ultimately create relationships with other models that WordPress doesn’t natively support.
Anyway, I’m writing unit tests for everything that’s going into the application and I hit an interesting point when it came to unit testing the validation functions.
At the risk of sounding like a marketer rather than a fan and contributor of the plugin, Easy Digital Downloads is a free plugin for WordPress that makes it exceptionally easy to sell digital products through your WordPress-based site.
Though it’s available for download from the WordPress Plugins Repository, Pippin – the lead developer behind the plugin – open sourced the plugin on GitHub in order to get other developers involved.
This past weekend, I was able to contribute a couple of fixes. In light in the whole plugin conversion that’s going on within the WordPress Developer Community, I found several points worth mentioning with regards to getting involved with Easy Digital Downloads.
In some ways, plugins are kind of the “apps of WordPress” and they need to be treated as such. Many developers care about improving WordPress plugins and the associated experience, but there’s a long way to go.
Currently, it’s more like the Wild West than anything else: Anyone who can write code that does something with WordPress – regardless of if it follows any of the best practices – and can have their work added the plugin repository.
Last week, an impromptu discussion about the state of plugins grew into a much more serious talk. So much so that what started as a Twitter conversation moved to a Google Hangout then migrated to a blog.
Obviously, this touched a sensitive spot in the WordPress Developer community and a discussing ensued about what could be done to begin improving WordPress plugins and the associated process and repository:
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