Now that Jane’s announcement has made it official, I need to prepare for my talk at WordCamp San Francisco. The working title is “Deep Voodoo: How the innermost innards of WordPress work” and the working content is nil.
This is where you come in. As a core contributor or plugin developer, you are aware of areas in WordPress code that scare you. I’ve been there and back again. I’ve digested, debugged and patched some of the most labyrinthine logic. I’ve even written some of the worst of it. On Saturday, August 13, I will try to make sense of it for everyone.
Please take a minute to recall something in the core code of WordPress that really stumps you. Ask me about it. I will try to work all of your comments into my talk, provided that I can’t answer it with a quick reply, a link to the Codex or a Google search.
If this gambit of asking for questions beforehand fails, maybe I’ll just give a tour of my personal favorite fork of WordPress in which every function block is shaped like a pony. (Please don’t let that happen.)
Michael Fields
/ July 18, 2011An overview of the list table classes would be killer
Andy Skelton
/ July 18, 2011Are you still stumped after reading the codex page?
Michael Fields
/ July 18, 2011I’m sure I could figure it out
Thanks! I honestly never sought out the documentation. After re-reading your post, I can think of two other things that might be a better fit. I’ve been able to figure these out on my own, but not without a bit of pain and trial and error. 1. Creating custom Walker Classes. 2. Hooking into / re-purposing the media upload modal. IMHO, this stuff is rather voodoo-ish.
Matthew Muro
/ July 18, 2011I recommend the Custom List Table Example plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-list-table-example/
I just used it to help me on my latest plugin and it’s super useful.
Andy Skelton
/ July 18, 2011That plugin looks much more helpful than the codex page. Thanks for posting the link.
Michael Fields
/ July 18, 2011Thanks for the link Matthew! Bookmarked. Will dig in soon!
Rarst
/ July 18, 2011I had once tried to do interesting stuff with feed caching… Several attempts failed miserably. It’s not that SimplePie is complex, but as third party library it is very different from WP. And then WP interfaces with it by plugging in caching classes that change SimplePie’s file-based caching mechanisms into file-like abstraction based on WP’s transients… Ouch. Maybe not as complex, as fragile and hard to deal with.
And of course there is rewrite stuff. I cannot even formulate what exactly I had trouble understanding when I went in that corner so I will put it under “everything”.
PS both of these were while back when I wasn’t spending that much time deep inside core… might make sense to revisit feeds
Mike Schinkel
/ July 18, 2011There are three things that I struggle with, in order of interest:
1.) Caching – How does caching work and if you are writing plugins how best to use it?
2.) Admin Menus – There are some things that seem impossible to do, but Nacin said on Twitter there were possible (though he’s never followed up to explain.) See here http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16050 and/or email me if you’d like me to elaborate.
3.) Walkers – How to extend them without having to duplicate so much code that’s already in WordPress and/or how to best hook into them?
Thanks in advance.
mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)
/ July 18, 2011+1 on Rewrite.
Andy Skelton
/ July 18, 2011Rewrite is very broad. I would be happy to cover specific parts of rewrite. Any task or feature in particular?
Rarst
/ July 19, 2011How about by what magic nice pretty permalink gets turned into query variables.
Andy Skelton
/ July 19, 2011That’s definitely worth some talk time.
Matthew Muro
/ July 19, 2011I’d like to see more about transients and providing your own update process for private plugins.
Rarst
/ July 19, 2011What do you find complex about transients? I dealt with them a lot, maybe can point out stuff to check out (thanks for link to that tables plugin!).