[wp-hackers] Developer portal

[Ravi Narayan Sarma]

On Dec 22, 2009, at 5:56 PM, scribu wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 12:37 AM, [ ravi ] <ravi-lists at g8o.net> wrote:
> 
>> There are some things that just take time if I want to do them the right
>> way... like right now, I am trying to figure out how some of the Comment
>> Administration actions seem to respond AJAXily (e.g: approve/unapprove) and
>> I am not at all sure how that's done. I want to add some additional comment
>> actions (which act via AJAX) and I can code all that up quickly if I just
>> implemented the AJAX query/response for those actions (using jQuery perhaps,
>> with clues from the corresponding Codex page). But perhaps I am overworking?
>> Outside of asking on wp-hackers, is there a document that will tell me? (so
>> far, I don't know the answer after looking at some of the AJAX and admin
>> plugins related Codex pages).
>> 
> 
> No, there isn't a tutorial that will tell you how the AJAXy action links for
> comments work. But you have something much more valuable at your disposal:
> the entire source code.
> 
> I'm not suggesting that a tutorial wouldn't help, just that at that level of
> detail, looking at the code is a much faster way to learn how stuff works.
> (Btw, using the Firebug console to follow AJAX requests is priceless.)


I agree with you a fair bit. But also: in particular, tutorials are not a good vehicle for such things and trying to explain all this stuff would take more tutorials/docs than are feasible to produce/maintain. Such is the nature of the beast. But some sort of very rough design document would be a huge boon. There is also of course this list.

Indeed I am ploughing through the code to figure out what’s going on. The nature of web apps makes it just that bit harder, since an action might be performed in JavaScript, or a call to a server script, or a CSS based JavaScript action using jQuery or some such. I use the WebKit console/debugger that comes with Safari and Chrome, which gives me a decent bit of insight into what’s going on. I will see if Firebug can help me more.

Thank you for commenting,

	— ravi