Creating Plugins

Overview

WP MVC provides a command line utility for automating the creation (and deletion) of WP MVC-based plugins and the models, views, and controllers used in those plugins. The utility is located at plugins/wp-mvc/wpmvc; before using it, you'll want to make sure that it's executable:

cd path/to/plugins/wp-mvc

chmod +x wpmvc

See Generating Code for more information on this utility, including how to use it on a Windows machine, how to set a custom path to the PHP executable (this is necessary in MAMP), and how to set a custom path to the WordPress directory.

Creating a WP MVC-based plugin

To create a WordPress plugin that will use WP MVC, run the following:

./wpmvc generate plugin MyPlugin

This will create the directory plugins/my-plugin/, the files necessary for the plugin to be activated, and a skeleton structure of the app/ directory.

Creating models, views, and controllers for a WP MVC-based plugin

After creating a plugin, you'll want to generate code for the models, views, and controllers of each of its resources. To create all of these for a given resource (e.g. a resource named MyVenue that represents venues), run the following, where MyPlugin is the name of your plugin and MyVenue is the name of your resource:

./wpmvc generate scaffold MyPlugin MyVenue

The generated code will be in plugins/my-plugin/app/ and assumes that a database column named name is present and will be used to represent the resource in views, but this can easily be modified. There will now be an administrative menu (My Venues) for this resource in WordPress, and you'll be able to browse to URLs like /my_venues/ and /my_venues/1/ to see the public-facing views.

Other commands

The wpmvc utility can also be used to selectively create or delete the model, views, or controllers for a specified resource. Here are some examples that should be fairly self-explanatory:

./wpmvc generate model MyPlugin MyVenue

./wpmvc generate views MyPlugin MyVenue

./wpmvc generate controllers MyPlugin MyVenue

./wpmvc destroy model MyPlugin MyVenue

./wpmvc destroy views MyPlugin MyVenue

./wpmvc destroy controllers MyPlugin MyVenue