December 2019
Intermediate to advanced
543 pages
12h 52m
English
Content preview from Building Web Apps with WordPress, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 4. Themes
WordPress themes drive the frontend of your web app. In Chapter 1, we presented the analogy that WordPress themes are like views in a traditional MVC framework. The analogy isn’t perfect, but themes and views are similar in that they both control the way your app will look and are where your designers will spend most of their time.
The Theme Developer Handbook put together by the WordPress community is the definitive source for learning how to build themes for WordPress in a standards-based way. All theme developers should use that resource. This chapter covers areas of theme development especially important to app developers.
Themes Versus Plugins
At some level, all source files in your themes and plugins are just .php files loaded at different times by WordPress. In theory, your entire app code could reside in one theme or one plugin. In practice, you’ll want to reserve your theme for code related to the frontend (views) of your website and use plugins for your app’s backend (models and controllers).
Where you decide to put some code will depend on whether you are primarily building a full app or an individual plugin or theme.
Where to Place Code When Developing Apps
If you are building a full web app—basically one WordPress installation—you will have full access to the site and what themes and plugins are installed. Your code could go anywhere. Even so, you should follow some thought process when deciding whether a particular feature should be coded as a ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.