Whenever you’re working on a larger project that’s based on WordPress, the odds that you’re going to be working with more than a single data source – that is, the WordPress database – are higher than normal. For example, you may be working on a project that has to coordinate information from:
- the WordPress database,
- a help desk ticketing system,
- a content importing system,
- another third-party API,
- and possible more.
And when this happens, it can become a bit cumbersome to write code that makes it easy to retrieve information from those different places. This what developers usually talk about when they refer to dealing with “layers” in their application. That is,
- there are layers for presenting information to the user,
layers for handling business logic (or domain logic), - layers for communicating with APIs,
- and layers for storing data.
Honestly, you don’t have to have a variety of data stores to watch to create a layer that makes it easier to send and retrieve data from the database, that’s just when it’s more common. You can just as effectively work with a single data store, like the WordPress database, when implementing the repository pattern.
Regardless, if you’re building a larger website, web application, or plugin, implementing the repository pattern is something that can pay dividends in maintenance, clarity of code, and separation of concerns.
But how might this be implemented within WordPress? It’s not terribly challenging, but first, it’s worth reviewing a repository primer before jumping into any code.
