Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

Using object oriented code is a must for me. Object oriented code is more than just organization of the code, it’s organization of one’s thinking. I wanted to talk about using static class methods as handlers for WordPress actions. This is important to me because often my plugins are implemented as a class.

add_action('init', 'MyPlugin::Init');

class MyPlugin
{
    public static function Init()
    {
        // Put Some Code Here
    }
}

Pretty easy. What I really like about this is that the class name acts as a namespace, so I can use the simple function name Init instead of naming my function something annoying like myplugin_init.

I use this pattern all the time to initialize an instance of the class so that it can be used elsewhere, such as in a theme:

add_action('init', 'MyPlugin::Init');

class MyPlugin
{
    private $userName = null;

    public static function Init()
    {
        global $myPlugin;

        $myPlugin = new MyPlugin();

        // The following line would probably go into a 
        // constructor method and get the real current
        // user name.

        $myPlugin->userName = 'bob';
    }

    pubic function GetUserName()
    {
        return $this->userName;
    }
}

Then any other non-plugin code, like a theme for instance, can detect the presence of the plugin and use it.

global $myPlugin;

if (isset($myPlugin))
{
    echo 'MyPlugin is installed, ', $myPlugin->GetUserName();
}

Happy Coding!