I am trying to understand a bit about how WordPress works in development..
I already created some shortcodes that I can just edit in on my page and some WIdgets that seem to display on every site or blog post that I created...
My question is: What is the general scope of the widgets or plugins in WordPress that I create? I know there are hooks and WordPress API functions to only show them on specific parts of WordPress, e.g on the admin-panel, or just in the widget sidebar of a page...
But are there some good sources about the architecture and scopes of how and where to use your plugins? Are they kind of injected into every page I create on my WP pages? (e.g with enqueue_scripts or so?). It's just a bit too overwhelming for me as a beginner to get a good overview...
And how are those functions from WP API made accessible in my plugin files/folders when I never imported them? I guess it's based on some module technique but no idea how..
It's good to delve your feet into the WordPress (WP) new concept called blocks you can find all the details here: Block Documentation
Creating widgets and shortcodes is a way older process nowadays most people keep their eyes on WordPress Blocks and especially FSE (Full Site Editor) therefore I would suggest you start learning that thing ASAP.
Let's come to your queries:
How WordPress works technically
Go to your WordPress directory you will find the file called index.php which is responsible for bootstrapping your application
Along with the index.php you will find a few directories called
wp-admin
wp-includes
wp-content
wp-admin
Where WP have all functionalities happening in the admin part are executed by accessing classes and functions present inside of this directory
wp-includes
This directory has all the utility and helper classes and functions
wp-content
This is the only directory developer can add/edit the files which store all of your plugins, themes, uploads, and other custom directories if your
code or any other plugin code created
For more details on how WP works
It's quite a challenge to explain all the ins and outs WP in a single post but you can find the detailed explanation in the official documentation
WordPress mainly depends on hooks and hooks are come under any of these two categories:
action hook
filter hook
For more details on WP hooks
How do plugins or themes work?
Both plugins and themes have a terminology called headers using that header metadata WP fills all the details in the plugins listing admin page and in themes listing page
For more details on header
Themes mainly depend on the concept called loops which responsible for fetching the posts data and build the necessary details using template tags and iterate them using the loop. Based on the type of page the user visited WP uses the template hierarchy to render the page as per the request that happened on the client end.
For more details on how WP loops works
For more details on how template hierarchy works
Headless CMS
Yes, you can make your complete WP into a headless CMS with the help of WP REST API. The REST API is used to access WordPress outside of the WP for e.g. if your android app need to fetch any posts or categories or user from WP using this REST API it can do that. Also you can create your custom endpoints too
Additionally, try to explore WP CLI
I believe that I covered most of the things required to understand how WP works, to be clear this post abstracted many of the things to make it as compact as possible for anyone who started entering into the WP development.
If you like to know more of these abstract explanation in a detailed way then always visit the official documentation
If your ide have an auto-complete feature please try to explore all of these functions (wildcard list) which contains most of the security functions provided by WP
is_*
exists_*
validate_*
sanitize_*
esc_*
*kses*
*nonce*
Related
I'm putting together a WordPress site for a charity organization which upgrades the look & feel of their existing site. Their existing site had a few PHP scripts and an events database for their project listings and I changed the output so that the script emulates the WordPress UI using:
define( 'WP_USE_THEMES', true );
require_once "wp-load.php";
The site uses the Monarch social plugin to enable sharing and I need to have that work on the emulated project page.
I haven't been able to find what I should include.
I tried adding both of these lines, separately, but they had no affect:
require_once "wp-content/plugins/monarch/monarch.php";
require_once "wp-content/plugins/monarch/core/init.php";
Upon looking at the code and trying to call functions that looked like potential functions to execute it, they resulted in an error or does nothing.
As someone completely unfamiliar with the intricacies of WordPress doing a pro bono favor for a charity organization, I did not realize that page templates could be used as the destination for custom PHP code accessing a non-WordPress database, etc.
The solution steps (which may hopefully help someone else equally unaware of WordPress) are as follows:
Use the page template page as reference to create a page template.
I added my page template to the same location as the theme's page.php template
Then create a page in WordPress and specify its template as the one just created.
Call that new page with whatever parameters after ?xyz=value;abc=etc. as needed
This may be basic for people who live in WordPress but it wasn't immediately clear to me.
Thanks to the comments by #ChrisHaas!
I found a article on the atk4 blog http://agiletoolkit.org/blog/integrating-agile-toolkit-with-wordpress/ I followed the instructions and i get a error and it says the ApiWeb Class not found. Then I looked in index.php on the real framework that you download and it initializes everything differently then the blog post did so. I'm wondering if ATK4 can be integrated or maybe I'm doing something wrong?
I'm also currently integrating a wordpress site with ATK4 at the moment.
The ApiWeb.php class is present in the atk4/lib directory in both 4.2 and 4.1.3 versions of atk4 so not sure why you are getting an error.
What is suggested on the blog page about integrating ATK4 with wordpress is that you would load the ATK4 libraries as php embedded in the pages so you would need to ensure you change the include line based on where you have placed the atk4 files.
<?php
include 'atk4/loader.php';
$api=new ApiWeb('sample_project');
$api->add('jUI');
.. .. ..
$api->execute();
?>
I havent tried this but think you would need to verify the path to ATK4 is correct.
I've taken a different approach to integrating Wordpress and ATK4 - rather than embedding ATK4 into the pages as per the blog article you referenced, i'm going with installing wordpress in one installation and ATK4 in a separate one and using the same template in both.
The wordpress template i'm using is from themeforest and it came with a WP folder containing the Wordpress files plus a HTML folder that contains example pages. I took one of the HTML pages and created a new templates/default/shared.html inserting the atk4 tags such as in the appropriate places.
I've created a menu in Wordpress Theme->xxx->Menu which are mostly static pages from Wordpress and one menu option which is a link to the start of the ATK4 root. Because i'm using the same template, it looks like a single site. In my case, i'm not using the login functionality of Wordpress - all the wordpress pages will be accessible without logging in but i am using a dynamic second level menu and options based on the logged in user which will be defined in Frontend.php
The ATK4 menu gave me a problem because it wasnt consistent with the site and after a while trying to style the menus with CSS and create a submenu using Menu_Basic and Menu_Lite, i went with using ATK4 Views and split the HTML from the wordpress theme, to create a menu.html, a submenu.html and a menuitem.html and have set this using code in Frontend.php
It's still a work in progress so i can't provide the link at the moment as it's not online yet but it seems to be working and may give you other ideas depending on what you want to achieve with integrating ATK4 and Wordpress.
If you want to have a common login for ATK4 and Wordpress (using ATK4 to control the access each user has), there is a plugin for Wordpress that might help with external DB Auth so you could use this with the BasicAuth of ATK4 instead of using Wordpress Auth functionality.
I'm new to writing WP plugins. My plugin code is ready so I'm working on the admin pages.
Is there an easy way to create similar tables and forms as the rest of WP admin pages or one is left to reverse engineer those interfaces or make his own?
There's an entire documentation section about it. Also, there's a plugin to help you style your plugin, that shows all the styling used by the admin interface.
im looking easy steps for convert any html/php template into a very simple wordpress theme for personal use. I have a site, in there i want news at the begining using the wordpress interface, i worked a lot with wordpress and i made some themes, but modifing already made ones, so i didnt care a lot about the code.
So, lookin in internet i dint found a good step by step tutorial in order to create a simple theme in wordpress from 0. Remember that i dont need sidebars, widgets and soo, i only need "the loop", or, the last 3 post made.
It's as simple as installing wordpress correctly and then including the wp-blog-header file into your pages. Doing so will give you access to all of WP's functions.
require('/path/to/wp-blog-header.php');
$posts = get_posts('arguments');
Has anyone ever modified the "post-new.php" file in their WordPress installation?
I want to modify the look of this page to include pieces that I standardly include in my blog posts, and I just don't know if it is do-able/easy/worth my time.
Should I just find another CMS that allows more modifcation like Drupal?
No reason to modify the core files - you can add stuff via plugins. See, for example, the more fields plugin - it adds to the new/edit post form without breaking your ability to upgrade the core installation.
Drupal's great, but if you're focusing on blogging you may get better results tweaking WP via plugins. I use WordPress for blog sites, and Drupal for most others.