WordPress Complete - Sixth Edition

The widget initiation function

Let's start with the widget initiation function. Blank, it looks like this:

public function __construct() { 
  $widget_ops = array(); 
  $control_ops = array(); 
  parent::__construct('base-id', 'name', $widget_ops, 
     $control_ops); 
}

In this function, which is the constructor of the class, we initialize various things that the WP_Widget class is expecting. The first two variables, to which you can give any name you want, are just a handy way to set the two array variables expected by the third line of code.

Let's take a look at these three lines of code:

• The $widget_ops variable is where you can set the class name, which is given to the div widget itself, and the description, which is shown in wp-admin on the widgets ...