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.
Out-of-the-box WordPress does not provide a way to introduce the Posts Page (Blog), as the editor is turned off and there is no automatic rendering of the content before the posts. In this lab, you will build a Blog Intro real-world, custom plugin which provides an introduction or welcome feature for your clients. As you build this plugin, you are learning about fetching content from the database, sanitizing, the Genesis framework, views, and more.
after_theme_setup?Let’s talk about how I knew to use after_setup_theme. You will look at in WordPress Core.
It’s time to build out the HTML structure and put it into the view. What is a view? Why do you want to use it? Let’s talk about the qualities of clean, quality code. You will also learn about how to load the view as well as the variable scope. To learn more about variable scope and including files, go to the PHP Variables Bootcamp.
Let’s finish preparing the content for rendering out to the browser. How about if there are shortcodes in the code? How do we process those? How about using auto-formatting the paragraph HTML elements? In this episode, you will add in the do_shortcode and then wpautop.
get_postLet’s go into WordPress Core to understand if we can use get_post to sanitize fields when in display filter mode. You will reverse engineer Core to discover for yourself. You will use has_filter to see if there is a filter event that does the sanitizing for the data post_content. You’ll also learn about foreach.
Anything out of the database is not safe. It has to be sanitized before it is rendered out to the browser. Let’s talk about how to sanitize and which sanitizing function to use for the plugin. In this episode, you will see some nefarious code in action. Then you’ll try out two different sanitizing functions: esc_html wp_kses_post
get_post – Part 2This episode continues reverse engineering get_post in WordPress Core. Now that you understand the database, or at least have a basic understanding of it and SQL, you will continue looking at get_post. You’ll see how each column in the database populates a property in the object that you get back when calling this function.
get_post – Part 1Let’s go deeper and head into Core to look at get_post. This function is going to either pull the post content from the database or cache. In this episode, you will learn about both and reverse engineer the function to discover when it’s pulling from one or the other. As the function is dealing with the database, it’s time to teach you some SQL. You will play around with the database to see how to pull records. I use Sequel Pro, but you can use phpMyAdmin to do the same exploring of the database. Here are additional resources about PHP […]
Let’s refactor how you are getting the posts page object by abstracting it into a separate, reusable function. Then you’ll add in protection to ensure an object is received back from the database before continuing the processing. You will be learning about clean, quality code in this episode too. You will learn about the Falsey Conditional Expression.
is_homeLet’s go into WordPress Core and talk about how is_home() works. You will also learn about objects and OOP in this episode, as is_home() is a wrapper around the instance of WP_Query. You can also see this hands-on lab to learn the differences between is_home and is_front_page:
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