Post Meta Meeting

Tuesday December 3rd & 10th 2013

What

• Sunrise v1

Where

• Git on BitBucket

  • https://bitbucket.org/newclarity/sunrise-1

• Example code:

  • https://gist.github.com/mikeschinkel/7775461

Who

• Mike Schinkel
• Micah Wood (wpcholar)
• Andrey (Rarst) Savchenko
• Taras Mankovski

Why

• We built a company’s products
  • Platform for building large lawfirm website
• Client didn’t respond well to: "Well we can’t (easily) to do"

Architecture

• Focused on programmer productivity

  • Source code solution for version control
  • Sunrise was on 2nd generation code
  • ASIDE: We are now on 5th generation code style
    • See: https://github.com/newclarity/exowp
    • Exo is an MVC Skeleton for WordPress, w/mixins
      • Not Forms/Fields, but lower level for MVC
      • Redesign of Sunrise would follow Exo architecture

• Core OOP layer

  • Fields
  • Forms
  • etc.

• Sitebuilder layer

  • register_form()
  • register_field()
  • Virtual Field Types

• Themer layer

  • get_field()
  • the_field()

Admin User Interface

• Should be able to completely replace metaboxes in admin UI
  • Especially Title, URL and TinyMCE editor
• Most common use-case; a single metabox
  • Optional "modules" should be able to add to that metabox
    • vs. adding another metabox.
  • Adding to metabox is not hard with Sunrise architecture.

Storage Format

• For Post Meta Key & Value
• See SQL Query

Field Features Objects

Fields generate collection of HTML elements.

Made sense to create "field feature" class to subclass because all shared so much code.

• Entry
• Label
• Help
• InfoBox
• Message

get_field()/the_field()

• Simple naming

• Filters:

  • 'pre_get_field'
  • 'get_field'
  • 'empty_field'
  • 'the_field'

• Virtual fields

  • "nested dolls"

• Issue to address with naming conventions or $args type: Return values of string/numeric vs. object/array vs. HTML

Virtual Fields

• Especially useful to output Schema.org valid markup
• Postal Address: ‘postal_address’
  • Stored as:
    • ‘street’
    • ‘city’
    • ‘state’
    • ‘zip’
    • ‘country’

Virtual Field Types

• "Real" types defined by class
• Virtual types based on existing type w/set of arguments.
  • Like cascading properties of CSS

Storage Types

Field storage defined by field, themer need not no storage location.

• Meta storage
• Core storage
• Table storage (custom sql)
• Taxonomy (term) storage
• Future/Plugins
  • Pods
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • Amazon S3
  • Other…?

Dynamic Forms within Forms

• Form Selector Field
• One field could display a form within a field
• Created a ‘form_type’ meta field to control which form type

Repeating Fields

• Overuse leads to madness
• Should support simpler use-cases
• Repeating should be in core framework, not its own field type
• Complex use-cases should use object/post relationships (hint/hint)

Other Considerations

• Minimize nested arrays when initializing
• Separate Declaration from Fixup
• Multiple register_field() vs. one register_fields()
• Then there is MVC + Mixins…

Demo Code

• https://gist.github.com/mikeschinkel/7775461