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)

Creating a custom API

Custom APIs are essential for adding web application-specific behaviors, which go beyond the generic blogging functionality. We need the implementation for both the server and client to create a custom API. Here, we will build an API function that outputs the list of topics of a specified forum in the forum application. Here, we will use a separate plugin for API creation as an API is usually a separate component from the application. Let's get started by creating another plugin folder called wpwa-xml-rpc-api with the main file called class-wpwa-xml-rpc-api.php. Since this is a plugin with a basic set of functions, we don't use the plugin coding structure used in the forum plugin.

Let's look at the initial code to build the API server:

    class WPWAF_XML_RPC_API { 
public function __construct() {
add_filter('xmlrpc_methods', array($this, 'xml_rpc_api...