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Labs

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.

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Finish by Topic Shortcode

In this episode, you’ll finish building the loop code to render out each FAQ. We’ll use the same FAQ view file. Therefore, we need to keep the variables named the same. Since we are in the loop and we setup the post within WordPress Core, i.e. when we did $query->the_post(), we can use the API wrapper functions, such as get_the_title() and get_the_content(). Then we need to order the FAQs by the menu order. We’ll set both the order and orderby parameters. To finish up, let’s document our code now by adding the DocBlocks. We’ll also type hint the function parameters […]

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Continue Building the Shortcode

In this episode, we’ll continue building the shortcode for the topic. We’ll look move the while loop to a new function to process the individual FAQs. As we are building, notice that we have a decision to make: Do we display a message when no FAQs are found? Let’s do that. But instead of echoing at each message, let’s make it configurable and give access through the shortcode’s user-defined attributes. Then the author (or you) can turn it off and on as well as change the messages. This is a refactoring exercise for you. We start off by making sure […]

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Add a FAQ Feature to the Collapsible Content Plugin – Part 2

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.

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Let Theme Override Our Archive Template

In the last episode, you wrote the code to serve the archive template for the FAQ custom post type from the plugin. Now we need to allow the theme to override. If a developer wants to change the archive, s/he could add an archive-faq.php file to their theme. In that case, you’d want to load their template instead of yours. Give the power to the theme over the plugin for templates. There are a couple of approaches to accomplishing this feature. You’ll first build a solution with Technique 1 that locates the template, and if not available, it then returns […]

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Test, Fix, Commit, and Wrap

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 […]

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Define a WP_Query for Topic

For the feature that fetches the FAQs by a specified topic, we need to build a custom query. WordPress provides the ability for us to configure what we want using WP_Query. Let’s walk through the configuration parameters and figure out what we need to build a query that is based upon a certain post type, taxonomy, and term slug. We’ll use the reference guide from Bill Erickson to explore the needed configuration parameters. We’ll also take a look in WordPress Core at the WP_Query class construct and talk a little bit about PHP OOP.

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Fixing the Architecture

Sometimes you go down a path with your architecture and then discover that it doesn’t fit your needs. It’s good that the problem happened, as now you and I can walk through the process of fixing the architecture. Let’s talk through the thought process of fixing the architecture. It’s a good exercise of how to re-think your code and approach.

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

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 […]

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Architect the Shortcode

The feature from the product backlog says that we need to develop a shortcode that embeds a single FAQ or a group of FAQs by a single topic. Hum, how are we going to accomplish this with one shortcode? We can use the user-defined attributes to let the author tell us which one to process. We can do the following: [faq post_id=”43″] [faq topic=”billing-and-payments”] Therefore, we are building a faq shortcode with two different user-defined attributes: post_id and topic. How are we going to process these two different requests? For the single FAQ, we get the post ID. Therefore, we […]

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Collapsible Content Plugin with FAQ - Part 2

Review and Commit Changes

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.

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