Book Image

Wordpress Web Application Development - Third Edition

By : Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake
Book Image

Wordpress Web Application Development - Third Edition

By: Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake

Overview of this book

WordPress is one of the most rapidly expanding markets on the Web. Learning how to build complex and scalable web applications will give you the ability and knowledge to step into the future of WordPress. WordPress 4.7 introduces some exciting new improvements and several bug fixes, which further improve the entire development process.This book is a practical, scenario-based guide to expanding the power of the WordPress core modules to develop modular and maintainable real-world applications from scratch. This book consistently emphasizes adapting WordPress features into web applications. It will walk you through the advanced usages of existing features such as access controlling; database handling; custom post types; pluggable plugins; content restrictions; routing; translation; caching; and many more, while you build the backend of a forum management application. This book begins by explaining how to plan the development of a web application using WordPress' core features. Once the core features are explained, you will learn how to build an application by extending them through custom plugin development. Finally, you will explore advanced non-functional features and application integration. After reading this book, you will have the ability to develop powerful web applications rapidly within limited time frames.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Enhancing features of the questions plugin

In the previous sections, we illustrated how to quickly adapt WordPress into different kinds of implementations by customizing its core features. However, I had to limit the functionality to the most basic level in order to keep this chapter short and interesting for beginners. If you are willing to improve it, you can try other new features of such an application. Here, we will be looking at some of the enhancements to this plugin and how we can use core WordPress features to implement them.

Customizing the design of questions

This is one of the major requirements in such an application. Here, we have a very basic layout and it's difficult to know whether this is a question or just a normal post. Consider the following screenshot for a well-designed question interface:

Remember that we customized the comments list for adding new options. Similarly, we can customize the design of questions to create an interface such as the previous screenshot by using a separate template file for the questions custom post type. We have to create a file called single-wpwa_question.php and change the design and functionality as we want.