In part one of this tutorial series we briefly looked at what unit tests are and we walked through a couple of simple examples to illustrate how we can use them to help ensure our code is working properly. Now it is time to actually setup our testing suite and run our first unit test.
Now that we have gotten through setting up our unit tests and we know the difference between tests and assertions, it is time to begin writing our actual unit tests for our plugin.
There are two terms we use often when talking about unit tests: tests and assertions. It’s important to know the distinction between the two and to fully understand what each refers to.
For many plugins, writing adequate unit tests requires the creation of sample post, user, taxonomy, and other data inside of the test WordPress install. While the standard WordPress functions for creating data, such as wp_insert_post(), work just fine, WordPress provides a set helper classes called WP_UnitTest_Factory that make it exceptionally simple.
Action hooks are used in WordPress to perform functions, or “actions”. They are used throughout many plugins and themes to provide an easy way for users of the theme or plugin to modify the output or the way it functions. This quick tutorial will give you a good introduction into how action hooks work.
You have probably noticed the Screen Options tab in the top right corner of many WordPress admin pages. This tab brings down a configuration panel that you can generally use to control what elements are displayed on the current amin page. One of the really great things about the Screen Options tab is that which…
Unit tests are a tool that developers use to test that code is performing properly. The idea behind them is to create a set of tests to determine if your code, given a known data set, gives the expected response.
Conditional tags are functions used in WordPress themes and plugins to display content, or perform actions, based upon whether a certain condition is true or not. A condition can be anything; it might be a condition for whether the user is currently viewing the homepage, or a condition for whether the user is currently logged-in.…
WordPress provides a set of great tools for processing ajax requests in plugins (and themes). I’m going to give you a quick example of how these tools can be used to accomplish a variety of tasks. For this example, We’ll just be using some simple alerts, but they will serve very well for demonstration purposes.
Payment gateways are “methods” of accepting payments for purchases through Easy Digital Downloads. By default, the plugin comes with two payment gateways: PayPal Standard and Manual Payment. Due to the extensible nature of the plugin, add-on payment gateways can be created, of which there are quite a few available. We can have a gateway to…
One of the very first things people tend to learn when writing plugins is how to attach custom HTML to the bottom of their WordPress posts using the filter called “the_content”. This is good, as it is an extremely useful filter, but rarely do tutorials really explain how to use this filter well, and how…
I’ve spent a lot of time lately dealing with a little known, under-documented but extremely useful class in WordPress called WP_Filesystem. WP_Filesystem is used throughout WordPress to handle core/plugin/themes updates and various tasks that require writing files to your webserver. The WP_Filesystem class is a base class that has many extensions depending on what ‘method’…
In part 9 of this Stripe.com + WordPress tutorial series, we are going to look at using the Stripe button for accepting payments through our website. The Stripe checkout button creates a really slick, secure popup window that the customer enters their payment details into.
Easy Content Types is a very powerful plugin that makes it really easy to setup custom post types, taxonomies, and meta boxes. One of great but lesser known features of the plugin is that it has an API built in to allow users to register their own custom meta field types that can be used…
The settings system that I built for Easy Digital Downloads is something I was very happy with once finished, especially because it is very extensible, and very easy to integrate with by other developers. I decided to record an overview video that walks through how the system works.
