Good morning Guido,
I’m very happy to see you interested in your users suggestions and I have a huge respect for your effort. If the implementation is far more work than expected, it would probably be much easier to maybe add some additional HTML and classes and just style the thing using CSS. So in other words: Keep it simple.
I’m totally new to WP-Plugin programming so my ideas might be harder to implement than I think.
After taking a deeper look at the widget and your code, here is how I would try to implement it:
– A snippet consists of two parts. The html code and a name. It can be defined on the plugins setting page.
– It can be included using a shortcode. Additional attributes might be given in the shortcode – comparable to your current implementation.
[vsel-snippet name="mysnippet" posts_per_page="5"]
Some Pseudocode to illustrate the idea:
snippet = getSnippet($snippet['name']);
if (snippet)
loop
properties = getSingleEventProperties() // include 'vsel-meta.php';
output = replaceSnippetVariablesWithEventProperties(properties ) // include 'vsel-snippet.php';
endloop
endif
Some suggestions
In vsel-widget-meta.php instead of using an individual variable for each data, I would use a hash. This would make it much easier to simply replace strings from the snippet.
So instead of
$widget_start_date = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'event-start-date', true );
$widget_end_date = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'event-date', true );
$widget_time = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'event-time', true );
You might use this:
$props = ['event-start-date', 'event-date', 'event-time'];
$id = get_the_ID();
$vselProps = [];
foreach ($props as $prop => $val) {
$vselProps[] = get_post_meta( $id, $val, true );
}
Add additional properties
$vselProps['event-title-with-link'] = '<a href="'. get_permalink() .'" rel="bookmark" title="'. get_the_title() .'">'. get_the_title() .'</a>';
And in your snippet script you might then search for the {…} patterns and replace them.
Here is a small proof of concept I just wrote:
<?php
$snippet = '<div class="event">
<h4 class="event-title">Start: {start-date}</h4>
<div class="event-content">
<p class="event-date">End: {end-date}</p>
<p class="event-time">Time: {time}</p>
<p class="event-location">At: {location}</p>
</div>
</div>';
$props = ['event-start-date' => 'Today', 'event-end-date' => 'Tomorrow', 'event-time' => '12:00-14:00', 'event-location' => "home"];
$vselProps = [];
foreach ($props as $prop => $val) {
// remove the "event-" part just to keep it simple in the snippet
$propWithoutEventPrefix = preg_replace("/^event-/", "", $prop);
$vselProps[$propWithoutEventPrefix] = $val;
}
// replace all occurences in the snippet
echo preg_replace_callback(
"/{(.+)?}/",
function ($foundPattern) {
global $vselProps;
return $vselProps[$foundPattern[1]];
},
$snippet
);
?>
Cheers
Daniel
