Labs are hands-on coding projects that you build along with Tonya as she explains the code, concepts, and thought processes behind it. You can use the labs to further your code knowledge or to use right in your projects. Each lab ties into the Docx to ensure you have the information you need.
Each lab is designed to further your understanding and mastery of code. You learn more about how to think about its construction, quality, maintainability, programmatic and logical thought, and problem-solving. While you may be building a specific thing, Tonya presents the why of it to make it adaptable far beyond that specific implementation, thereby giving you the means to make it your own, in any context.
In this hands-on lab, you and I will walk through the entire process of adding a new feature to an existing WordPress plugin. You’ll start with the Collapsible Content plugin and then add a FAQ feature to it. This feature will require you to plan, think, and execute building a custom post type, custom taxonomy, advanced SQL queries, custom archive, and shortcode.
As developers, it can be confusing to understand the intent and role of the mechanisms in WordPress to differentiate content. What are post types, taxonomies and terms, and custom fields? Why do they exist? When do you use the built-in ones? When do you build a custom one? We need a definitive guide that provides structure and best practices for differentiating content. We need a Developer’s Guide. In this first part of the series, we’ll discuss the why, what, and when of the WordPress post type from both a technical and practical perspectives.
Now let’s walk through and test our module. In doing so, you’ll find that we need to change the taxonomy’s registration as we don’t want to show it on the front-end. Let’s make that change. Then we’ll commit the final changes to your GitHub repository. I have to say how proud I am of you! Seriously! You worked right along with me. I know it was a long lab. The whole point was to walk you through the entire process of building a new feature module, step-by-step. I hope you learned about WordPress, PHP, Plugins, HTML, and more. We covered […]
Let’s talk through what you’ve accomplished in the archive template episodes. You’ll add another FAQ too. Then let’s commit the changes to your GitHub repository. You’ve made a lot of changes. It’s time to commit them.
In this episode, you and I are going to write the code that tells WordPress to load our archive template. Remember, out-of-the-box, WordPress doesn’t look in the plugins for templates; rather, it only searches the theme. Right? I showed that to you in the last episode. Therefore, we have to write the code that tells WordPress to load our file. Let’s dive into WordPress Core and look at how WordPress looks up and finds the template to load. We’re searching for a filter hook to use. You’ll look at get_archive_template() which is in wp-includes/template.php. Then you’ll build a helpers file […]
We want our plugin to provide a default archive template for the FAQ post type. This archive will group the FAQs by their topic and provide the HTML structure for each FAQ. We can’t expect theme developers or customizers to build this template for us. That’s not a reasonable expectation. Instead, we need to build the template and then serve it up. But WordPress does not serve templates from plugins out-of-the-box. Therefore, we will need to write the code to tell WordPress: “Hey, load this template please.” We’ll want to provide the means for the theme to override when it […]
We need a way to categorize the content within the FAQs. Right? Categorization allows you to group the FAQs together for displaying them. For example, look at our Help Center. Each article is grouped and then displayed by a specific topic. We have Pre-Sales, Billing and Payments, and more. These topics are terms. These terms are bound to a custom taxonomy. Therefore, we want to build a custom taxonomy. Let’s call it “topic.”
Now we need to handle flushing the rewrites when our plugin is activated or deactivated. We covered this topic in the Flush Rewrite Rules of the Custom Post Type Basics lab. In that episode, I showed you why you never ever want to flush the rewrite rules after your register a custom post type. Where should we put the activation and deactivation callbacks? Hum. Let me show you a couple of different strategies. As this is a module, we’ll opt to add the callbacks within the module itself. Why? It keeps everything together when you reuse this module. Pop Quiz […]
Next, our custom post type needs further options to be configured, such as the menu icon and archive. Let’s walk through the different options.
Out-of-the-box, when you register a custom post type, the feature supports are title and editor. That’s it. Hum, what if there are additional supports that you want, such as SEO or other custom ones from other plugins? If you have the Genesis framework installed, then it adds 3 feature supports. If you are using Yoast SEO, then it adds 1 feature supports. How do you specify these features when you build your plugin? You use the configuration code that you wrote in Exclude Post Type Features episode, as part of the Custom Post Type Basics lab. That code is reusable […]
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