Build the Shortcode – Single FAQ

Let’s start building the shortcode processor for the single FAQ, i.e. when the shortcode user-defined attribute specifies a single post ID to display. You and I will look at what we receive as user-defined attributes when processing the shortcode. We’ll look at the configuration parameters. We’ll think about different scenarios of how to process when we don’t receive a post ID or topic as well as when we receive an invalid post ID.

This episode is heavy PHP fundamentals. We’ll talk about:

• ternary operator
• variable scope
• variable scope when including a file
• type casting from string to integer data type
• grabbing a value by the keys within an associative array
• and more.

Whoops, we discover a problem

As we are building this processing functionality, we’ll discover that our assumptions for the architecture are wrong. What if the post ID is invalid and we don’t get back the post record when doing get_post()? Hmm, that’s problematic. Why? Because the HTML that is rendered out has the <dl> but nothing within it. That’s invalid HTML markup. Whoops. Instead, we have to rearchitect the shortcode to deal with this problem. We’ll do that in the next episode.