Help Scout documentation search with Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a tremendously powerful plugin for WordPress and Help Scout is an awesome customer support system that also provides a service for handling documentation. What they miss, however, is a direct connection that allows site owners to provide customers with a way to search the Help Scout documentation before they can submit a support ticket submission form.

Extending the WordPress metadata API

The WordPress metadata API is a simple way to store and retrieve information related to various objects in WordPress, such as posts, users, and taxonomy terms. Out of the box, WordPress includes post meta, user meta, and term meta, but what if you want metadata on other objects, such as custom objects provided by a plugin? Thankfully, the metadata API is actually quite simple to extend, allowing developers to easily register their own kind of metadata that is attached to their own, custom objects.

Custom Database API – The Basic API Class

In the previous sections of this series, we have looked at reasons you should build a custom database API, we have discussed how to structure your data, and we have looked at how to create the database tables. Now it is time to build the basic API that we will use to actually interact with our database. This will involve writing an API class with all of the necessary methods for retrieving, inserting, updating, and deleting data.

Custom Database API – Creating the Tables

Once you have laid out the structure for your database table, it is time to create the actual tables. This is where it gets fun. When the tables are created, you can really begin building your API for interacting with the database and that’s when this whole project begins to truly take shape.

Batch processing for big data

When it comes to handling large amounts of data, there is really only one way to reliably do it: batch processing. The concept of batch processing is simple. Instead of performing one large query and then parsing / formatting the data as a single process, you do it in batches, one small piece at a time. If you have ever attempted to query or export a large amount of data and had your server timeout, you’ll easily understand just how beneficial batch processing is.

Using wp_remote_get() to parse JSON from remote APIs

WordPress includes an exceptionally useful API called the HTTP API that can be used for sending data to and retrieving data from remote APIs. If you are building a plugin that talks to Stripe, MailChimp, or just about any other service that provides an API, you can use the WP HTTP API to make your job significantly easier. For this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use wp_remote_get(), one of the several functions included in the HTTP API, to retrieve and parse JSON data from a remote API.

Unit Tests for WordPress Plugins – The Factory

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.