Labs

What is the deal with scope? If you are working on a theme or some code, you’ll hear about scope. Or maybe you’ve tried to access a variable that’s in another function and you don’t understand why you can’t access it. Why? How about the global variables? Let’s talk about scope. Scope defines what parts of your code can access other code. In this episode, we’ll talk specifically about variables and their scope. Variables have scope. They belong to some access level. Variables within a function belong to that function. The function can use them, but code outside of that […]

Like all programming languages, PHP executes code in order. It starts at line 1 of the first file and goes down the page. As each file is loaded, its code is loaded into memory. Any code that can run does. When it’s done, control runs back to the point in the code that loaded it. Let’s talk about how code sequences.

What is a variable? What does it do? How do you use? Why does it exist? Let’s talk about variables and, more specifically, variables in PHP. Just like in mathematical equations and formulas, variables are used to “represent” a value. In programming, we use variables to represent some piece of information. We give that information a name and context, i.e. some human-readable meaning by the way we name the variable. Then we use the variable within our code to make decisions, do processing, configure a task to run, etc. Variables are defined and named by the author of the code. […]

We break up our code into logical parts in order to organize our code. In PHP we do this by files, folders, and functions. It lets us organize and structure our code. Why? Imagine all of the code in WordPress in one huge file. It would have tens of thousands of lines of code. Imagine trying to work on that one huge file. It would be very difficult and prone to errors. It’s also hard to build code in teams. We break up code to improve: readability reusability maintainability Imagine that 3 months from now your customer calls you with […]

You need to load files. Right? In PHP you use one of these constructs to load a file into memory (which then makes it run): include( ‘path/to/file’ ) include_once( ‘path/to/file’ ) require( ‘path/to/file’ ) require_once( ‘path/to/file’ ) Let’s look at how these work as well as talk about when you want to use one over the other. You’ll try to load a file that doesn’t exist and see that include gives you a warning while require causes the site to stop with a fatal error.