1. doing_it_right() with
Wordpress
Ryan Duff
Harrisburg WordPress Meetup
February 19th, 2013

2. Why do it right
• Save yourself time
• Save others time
• Save your clients money
• Save everybody from headaches

3. Ways to do it right
• Learn to organize your code
• ... document your code
• ... optimize your code
• Don’t reinvent the wheel
• Action Hooks and Filters
• Other very bad things to avoid

4. First things first
• Use the debug bar plugin
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
define(‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY, false);
define(‘SAVEQUERIES’, true);

5. Organize your code
• What goes in a plugin?
• What goes in a theme?
• Utilize mu-plugins/

6. Organize your code
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

7. Document your code
/** * Simple and uniform HTTP request API. * * Standardizes the HTTP
requests for WordPress. Handles cookies, gzip encoding and decoding,
chunk * decoding, if HTTP 1.1 and various other difficult HTTP protocol
implementations. * * @link http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4779 HTTP
API Proposal * * @package WordPress * @subpackage HTTP * @since
2.7.0 */

8. Optimize your code
• Cache
• Get rid of rotten database queries

9. Optimize your code
set_transient( $transient, $value, $expiration );
get_transient( $transient );
delete_transient( $transient );

10. Optimize your code
• Make sure the code you’re expecting matches
• Use $wpdb class in the correct cases, WP_Query otherwise
• Sanitize everything
http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation

11. Don’t reinvent the wheel
• Clever code is not clever.
• Use built in APIs and methods

12. WordPress APIs

13. Action hooks and filters
• Hooks are places to DO things
• Filters are ways to CHANGE things

14. More things not to do
• Don’t downgrade jQuery
• Don’t create unnecessary settings
• Don’t forget to update

15. Secure code
• esc_html()
• esc_attr()
• esc_url()
• $wpdb->prepare()
http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation

16. How to learn more
• Read the code and contribute
http://core.trac.wordpress.org
• Ask questions in #wordpress on freenode

17. Questions?
Ryan Duff
Fusionized Technology
http://fusionized.com
@ryancduff