Category: Content Management Systems

This post is part of the ClassicPress Plugin Development series in which I am going to look at both best practice for developing plugins and how I approach some requirements as well as some of the functions I commonly use.

In the last post in this series, on whether to use namespaces, I discussed whether they should be used or not and noted that I do not currently use them, but am debating whether I should.

At present, the azrcrv_tt_post_tweet function in my To Twitter plugin is called from a few other plugins in order to send a tweet; the function calls looks like this:

$tweet_result = azrcrv_tt_post_tweet($parameters);

This calls this function:

function azrcrv_tt_post_tweet($parameters){

If I was to update my plugins to use namespaces, in the To Twitter plugin a namespace would be added to the top of the PHP file (only the opening PHP tags and any comments should be before the namespace declaration). If I do make this change, I would use a developer and plugin specific namespace:

namespace azurecurve\ToTwitter;

The function to post the tweet, and all other functions, could then be renamed to remove the current developer and plugin specific prefixes thusly:

function post_tweet($parameters){

The other plugins which call this function, would need the function call to be amended to include the namespace:

$tweet_result = \azurecurve\ToTwitter\post_tweet($parameters);

With namespaces, it is possible to use a function name which matches that in the global namespace. For example, the get_option function is a standard ClassicPress function used to get the options for a plugin. I can create a function with the same name in a plugin without a conflict.

Calling the below will call the function in the plugin:

$options = get_option('azrcrv-tt');

To call the standard ClassicPress version in the global namespace I would prefix the function call with a \:

$options = \get_option('azrcrv-tt');

The final point to handle, is if you are using a ClassicPress hook such as add_action you are passing a string which will be executed in the global namespace so you need to pass the namespace of your plugin as part of the hook:

add_action('admin_menu', 'azurecurve\ToTwitter\create_admin_menu');

There is a predefined PHP constant available which you can use to avoid putting your namespace in many parts of your plugin; this can be useful in future if you need to change your namespace, as you then ony need to change the declaration at the top of the plugin:

add_action('admin_menu', __NAMESPACE__.'\create_admin_menu');

The same principles would apply PHP classes as well, but as I said in the coding paradigms blog post, I am not developing using object oriented programming and so am not covering classes.

This post is part of the ClassicPress Plugin Development series in which I am going to look at both best practice for developing plugins and how I approach some requirements as well as some of the functions I commonly use.

Namespaces are a standard feature of PHP, post version 5.2. A namespace is a way of addressing the problem of isolation. For example, if you have a function called load_cs in one part of your code, then you cannot use the same name elsewhere. For ClassicPress this also means that having that function in one plugin, you cannot have the same name in another plugin.

To avoid this problem with ClassicPress, the common approach is to prefix function names (and class names) with a developer and plugin specific prefix; I typically use azrcrv_{nn}_ where the highlighted section is one to four letters to represent the specific plugin (e.g. e for Events, uam for Update Admin Menu or smtp for SMTP).

John Alarcon, Code Potent, uses namespaces in all of his plugins so does not need to use developer and plugin specific prefixes; instead he uses a developer and plugin name namespace. For example, the PHP Error Log Viewer uses the following namespace declaration:

// Declare the namespace.
namespace CodePotent\PhpErrorLogViewer;

I started developing plugins for WordPress (back in 2013) before namespaces were introduced to PHP and have never adopted them. I rewrote my WordPress plugins specifically for ClassicPress in 2019 after I migrated all of my sites, but did not adopt namespaces. Partly this was to maintain some backward compatibility as some of the plugins have functions which are intended to be called from outside the plugin (such as URL Shortener which is typically called to display the shortlink in a theme) and partly because at the time I didn’t especially see the benefit.

As time has passed and I’ve created more plugins, I am thinking that was a mistake and I should have introduced namespaces when I did the ClassicPress rewrite; if I make this change now to existing plugins, this would, under semver, be a breaking change necessitating a major version number increase.

If you are starting off developing for ClassicPress, I would encourage you to seriously consider using namespaces in your development of plugins.