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.
Remember that one of the requirements is to add the ability to set the order for the questions within each topic. For the custom post type, we added the page attributes feature in order to gain access to the menu order. In this episode, let’s change our SQL to order by both the term ID and the menu order. We’ll also take a look at the database too. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is now to add this feature.
In the last episode, we built the boilerplate code for doing the Loop. Now it’s time to build the view files. We’ll reuse the QA shortcode view file. But remember that there could be more than one FAQ. We’d want to have the <dl> container outside of the view file. Plus we will want to display the topic too. Let’s do that in this episode. You will learn about how to process two different view files. The goal is to maintain the intent of the business logic and the view file. Therefore, we do not want to loop and process […]
Let’s build our archive template now. We are going to need to fetch the records from the database that are already grouped by their topics. To do this, let’s reuse the code from the Advanced SQL lab. You can get the code here on GitLab and load it into the archive file. Here is the lab to refresh yourself on how this code works, as I’m not going to re-explain in this episode. We’ll see what we get back and then adapt the code for our needs.
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 […]
What if you had multiple taxonomies? Think about that. What if you needed to add a “topic” and “faq-categories” for example? Using the current code, you’d copy the label generation code and copy it into the next taxonomy you are registering. That’s a lot of code. Instead, let’s build a label generator. Then you can call this function for any of your custom taxonomies. The code remains the same. The only thing that changes, typically, is the specific name. Why do this? It makes your code more readable and reusable. It speeds up your development time and reduces your costs. […]
Right if you were to view one of the new terms, you’d get a 404. Why? Think about it. Why does it give you a 404? Because you need to flush the rewrite rules. You can do this by going to Settings > Permalinks and clicking on “Save Changes” button. But for a real plugin, you won’t want to have your customer install, activate, and then have to go to Settings in order to get the taxonomy and custom post type to work. Right? Instead, you want to handle it within the plugin. In this video, you’ll add the taxonomy […]
In this episode, you and I are going to build the custom taxonomy code. We’ll use the code from the Team Bios plugin that you built in the Custom Taxonomy Basics lab. I want to show you just how easy it is to take boilerplate code and then configure it for another custom taxonomy. It literally will take you less than a minute and then bam, you have a custom taxonomy.
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 […]
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