AJAX and WordPress

When the web moved from HTML4 to HTML5, the rise of AJAX based web applications came along with it. AJAX (which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) can mean a number of things but in practice it often refers primarily to the client/server interaction where JavaScript can be used to communicate with a server by making calls at various times under various conditions to send and receive data. This can be happening as often as you like in real-time without the user having to navigate to another webpage or refresh their browser (i.e. asynchronously).

What is an example of this? Well, say I wanted to put a stock ticker on my webpage or in my web application. I could use JavaScript to make a call to a service like some stock-market API that will give me quotes on a particular stock, get the data back, and display it in the UI in a visually appealing manner. As these market prices update over time, I can periodically update the quotes that I’m displaying on the page. The format that the server returns data in really depends on the service you are calling. It can often be be XML (as the X in AJAX suggests) but another popular format is JSON. I actually like JSON a bit better, myself. The experience of parsing through everything in code just seems a bit cleaner so if there is the option to have the data you are trying to get returned to you in JSON, I’ll usually opt for that.

Because JavaScript is such a universally cross-platform language capable of running on so many different devices in different environments, this can be a great way for different applications to communicate with each other. The result, hopefully, is to give your users the best experience possible whether they are on desktop, mobile, tablet, or some other crazy device.

In the early part of the 21st century, something else that was and has been absolutely ubiquitous across the internet is WordPress. From it’s humble beginnings of being exclusively web-based blog software, it has transformed into essentially the most popular content management system (CMS) used for running small and medium sized websites or web applications.

In what follows, we can look at how we can undertake merging these 2 things together. We’re basically going to look at how we can send and receive JSON data to a WordPress database and read from and write to the tables within WordPress using AJAX.

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WordPress Custom Posts and Plugins

A lot has been written about WordPress over the years with a lot of the literature describing how flexible it is as a CMS and how you can, with a little know-how and a little work, turn it into whatever you want it to be. Much of this flexibility comes from the ability to register custom post types, where you can create “post types” of any kind within the WordPress CMS. For example, if I were using WordPress to run a company website I could create a “staff” post type, where every entry that I create would contain custom fields for the name of the staff member, their picture, their e-mail, and links to social media profiles. The same thing goes for just about any other post type you could think of: image galleries, sliders, portfolios, etc.

And if there is some functionality that you need that happens to be lacking in the native installation of WordPress, chances are you’ll be able to find something close to what you need in one of the tens of thousands of plugins that exist out on the web. By combining these 2 features (along with a host of others) WordPress is an immensely flexible content management system (CMS) and this is likely one of the reasons it has gained such popularity since it’s inception.

In what follows, we’re going to combine custom post types and WordPress plugin development and create a plugin that registers a custom “portfolio” post type and wraps all of the functionality for both the front and the back end within it. So we’re going to need to to create fields for the name of the portfolio item, fields for featured images, and fields for links to where the project is showcased. After we get through everything, this should give you a good roadmap to create any post type/plugin that you like. In fact, a lot of plugins do little more than register post types inside of some generic WordPress plugin scaffolding code. Because there is so much you can do with custom post types, this is often all you need.

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