This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Object Oriented Plugin Template Solution

Description

Gives authors of new plugins a leg up on creating a great, easy to maintain plugin by providing a carefully designed plugin skeleton to build on. Authors of existing plugins can extract individual components and concepts for transplantation into their own projects.

  • Clean, object-oriented design
  • PHPUnit tests
  • Admin screen uses the Settings API
  • Multisite support
  • Creates a table during activation
  • Drops the table and settings during deactivation
  • Uses WordPress’ i18n and provides scripts for generating the gettext files
  • Installation instructions have a script for renaming files, classes and IDs

See the FAQ section for more details about this plugin’s features.

Development of this plugin template happens on GitHub. Please submit bug and feature requests, pull requests, wiki entries
there. Releases are then squashed and pushed to WordPress’ Plugins SVN repository. This division is necessary due having being chastised that “the Plugins SVN repository is a release system, not a development system.”

Explanations

If you want an explanation of how this “plugin” works, please see the “PHPUnit Tests for WordPress Plugins” series on my blog.

Installation

  1. Download the zip file from WordPress’ plugin site: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/oop-plugin-template-solution/

  2. Unzip the file

  3. Here are some semi-automated steps to copy this plugin and rename the files, class names, and identifiers. The commands are in Bash, adjust them as needed for your environment. Replace the three mentions of “My Plugin” in the settings section with the name of your plugin.

    # Settings ----- # Plugin identifier / directory (hyphen separated). old_id=oop-plugin-template-solution new_id=my-plugin  # Class name (underscore separated). old_class=oop_plugin_template_solution new_class=my_plugin  # Plugin Name (space separated). old_name="Object Oriented Plugin Template Solution" new_name="My Plugin" # --------------   # Copy and rename the files. cp -R $old_id $new_id cd $new_id mv $old_id.php $new_id.php  # Replace strings in the files. find . -type f -exec sed "s/$old_id/$new_id/g" -i {} \; find . -type f -exec sed "s/$old_class/$new_class/g" -i {} \; find . -type f -exec sed "s/$old_name/$new_name/g" -i {} \; find . -type f -exec sed -E "s/^ \* (Author:|Author URI:|@author|@copyright) (.*)$/ * \1/g" -i {} \; find . -type f -exec sed "s@REPLACE_PLUGIN_URI@https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/oop-plugin-template-solution/@g" -i {} \; sed -E "s/^(Contributors|Donate link|Tags): (.*)$/\1:/g" -i readme.txt 
  4. Now get down to making the plugin do what you want. See the FAQ for instructions about particular aspects.

  5. Upload your plugin directory to your server’s /wp-content/plugins/
    directory

  6. Activate the plugin using WordPress’ admin interface:

    • Regular sites: Plugins
    • Sites using multisite networks: My Sites | Network Admin | Plugins

Removal

  1. This plugin offers the ability to remove all of this plugin’s settings from your database. Go to WordPress’ “Plugins” admin interface and click the “Settings” link for this plugin. In the “Deactivate” entry, click the “Yes, delete the damn data” button and save the form.

  2. Use WordPress’ “Plugins” admin interface to click the “Deactivate” link

  3. Remove the plugins directory from the server

FAQ

Multisite Networks

This plugin is coded to be installed in either a regular, single WordPress installation or as a network plugin for multisite installations. So, by default, multisite networks can only activate this plugin via the Network Admin panel.

If you want your plugin to be configurable for each site in a multisite network, follow the instructions in the docblock at the top of admin.php.

Settings API

We add some abstraction around WordPress’ Settings API. All you need to do is add some elements to two arrays and maybe create a section header if you want. This is way better than having to write out add_settings_field()
calls and creating display and validation callbacks for each and every field.

  1. Open admin.php in your favorite text editor

  2. Read the docblock at the top of the file

Unit Tests

This framework uses PHPUnit, so standard PHPUnit file, class, and method naming practices apply. Our framework requires that your test files and classes:

  • Have a require_once call for TestCase.php at the top of the script. That obtains the PHPUnit and other items needed. It’s the only file you need to include.
  • Classes must extend TestCase
  • If you add a setUpBeforeClass() method, it must call parent::setUpBeforeClass()
  • If you add a setUp() method, it must call parent::setUp()
  • If you add a tearDown() method, it must call parent::tearDown()
  • If you add a tearDownAfterClass() method, it must call parent::tearDownAfterClass()

Take a look at the TestLogin.php script for examples of how to handle calls to wp_mail() (and translations of mail messages) and wp_redirect(), the use of database savepoints, and manipulating user metadata.

Please note that the tests make extensive use of database transactions. Many tests will be skipped if your wp_options and wp_usermeta tables are not using the InnoDB storage engine.

To execute the tests, install and activate the plugin, then use a shell to cd into this plugin’s directory and call phpunit tests

While it is possible to test plugins using WordPress’ Automated Testing PHPUnit framework, it is a complex system, is another dependency, and runs in its own environment. The benefit of using my plugin’s PHPUnit is that it ships with the plugin and executes in the users actual WordPress installation. This means any end user can easily test how the plugin interacts with their site.

Translations

To produce the machine readable translations used by WordPress’ gettext implementation, use the scripts I made for generating all of the .pot, .po and .mo files:

  • cd languages
  • ./makepot.sh
  • Update the headers, version number, etc in the .pot file as desired.
  • To add a new language: touch <plugin-id>-<lc>_<CC>.mo Substitutions: plugin-id: the plugin’s identifier ($new_id from above) lc: language code CC: country code
  • ./updatepos.sh
  • Fill the translated text in the .po files.
  • ./makemos.sh

Reviews

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Contributors & Developers

“Object Oriented Plugin Template Solution” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

1.1.2 (2016-08-13)

  • Change translation domain from constant to string for integration with translate.wordpress.org

1.1.1 (2012-11-28)

  • Tell folks where explanations can be found.

1.1.0 (2012-11-08)

  • Move the wp_logout() and wp_redirect() calls from direct calls in the test method to a method in the tested class instead.

1.0.2 (2012-11-05)

  • Explain why can’t use PHPUnit’s @expectedException functionality.

1.0.1 (2012-11-05)

  • Clarify instructions and descriptions.

1.0.0 (2012-11-05)

  • Initial release.