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.
Let’s build, test, and validate the basics of the data store. In this hands-on coding lab, you’ll build the basic functionality and attributes of the data store in 3 different implementations: procedural, static class, and OOP. You’ll build a full test suite. And you’ll validate that the code complies to the WordPress Coding Standard.
We’re done with our plugin, but we do have an opportunity for optimization as well as housekeeping. It’s a good practice to walk through your code when you’re done to: re-evaluate look for optimization opportunities do some housekeeping like commenting, formatting, and cleanup and ensuring everything in a file supports the intent of that file. Let’s walk through our Metadata Module together.
In the last episode, we saw the ‘meta_key’ configuration in our custom fields. That is coming from our default configuration model. Since there’s nothing to overwrite it during the recursive merge in the configuration store, it is added into our configuration. How can we remove it? Let’s talk about that in this episode. We’ll talk about protecting your module’s code when selecting the strategy to implement.
We have a problem with our architecture. Do you know what it is? We have no way to differentiate and fetch only the keys for a specific component or module. In your work, you’ll likely have multiple modules using the ConfigStore. For example, you may have shortcodes, widgets, meta boxes, and custom post types all loading configurations into the store. How can you get only the configurations for the meta boxes? Right now, you can’t. In this episode, we’ll walk through a refactoring process to provide the means of fetching keys for just that component or module level. You’ll add […]
Continuing from Part 1, let’s layout our configuration store’s module, api, and internals. We are going to design this module in procedural, although you could design it in class wrapper (static functions within a class structure) or OOP. We’ll use a static variable to be our container. Resources Static Variables in PHP Static Variables – PHP Internals PHP Manual – Static Variable
Let’s test and figure out how to load a configuration file from the filesystem and get it into our configuration store. We’ll do this together step-by-step, systematically discovering how to load, how to extract the store key and configuration parameters, and thinking through our store. Resources In this episode, you’ll use: current() key() list()
We have a structural error in our configuration models. Oh bummer. Did you notice it? In this episode, let’s fix all 3 files before we move onto the Configuration Store.
We’ve completed our meta box configuration model. Now, let’s take that model and load up our 2 custom implementations. You’ll want to store each configuration file into the config folder. If the plugin was doing more than a meta box, then you’d put the configs into config/meta-box folder. Resources intval sanitize_text_field
In the last episode, I challenged you to complete the render parameters yourself. In this episode, we’ll walk through how I solved it. We’ll fill out the custom fields in our Configuration Model. Plus, we’ll refactor our render function for our new generic, configuration business logic.
Let’s layout the basic architecture of the configs, config store, and metadata. Work along with me in the video to get your plugin architecture setup and ready for the remaining parts of this lab.
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