Spots for WordPress Developer Notes

Development Plugins

Our Spots for WordPress plugin is designed to make your content management life with WP even easier.

Although there are developer notes on the WordPress.org repository, we’ve decided to maintain a page here where we can possibly show a broader range of information in the future, depending on the take-up of the plugin.

Template tags

Spots provides 2 template tags for developers named icit_spot and icit_get_spot.

icit_spot

This template tag echos out a spot:

icit_spot( $id_or_name, $template );

It takes the following parameters:

  • $id_or_name: Required. A numeric ID or the name of a spot as a string.
  • $template: Optional. A string used in a call to get_template_part()

icit_get_spot

This template tag performs the same function, but it allows the developer to specify wether to echo the result, or return it as a variable:

icit_get_spot( $id_or_name, $template, $echo );

It takes the following extra parameter:

  • $echo: Optional. Defaults to false. A boolean to indicate whether to echo the spot content or just return it.

Basic Usage

You can use spots to replace boilerplate text in your themes. If you have areas in your themes where typically you would hard code the text you could use the following code:

if ( function_exists( 'icit_spot' ) )
    icit_spot( 'Copyright' );

The above code would output the contents of a spot titled ‘Copyright’. If the spot does not exist it will be created as a draft. Spots in draft mode are only visible to logged in users with editing capabilities.

Templates

The plugin will initially look for a file in your theme using the get_template_part() function. If you have a file called spot.php in your theme that will be the default template for all spots. The icit_spot() function can take a second parameter for the template part to use for example:

if ( function_exists( 'icit_spot' ) )
    icit_spot( 'Copyright', 'copyright' );

The above code will make the plugin look in your theme folder for a file called spot-copyright.php to use for the output. If not available it will fall back to spot.php and if that is not available it will simply output the spot contents.

Use templates when you want to display a featured image from a spot or if you require some additional/alternative markup for the spot. Spots are just like posts, so in the templates you retrieve the contents of the spot using the_content() just as would in the loop.

Basic spot template example:

<div class="spot">
    <?php the_content(); ?>
</div>

Spot template with featured image:

<div class="spot-with-image">
    <?php
    if ( has_post_thumbnail() )
        the_post_thumbnail( 'medium' );
    the_content(); ?>
</div>

Additional

There are many filters and hooks available to get even more out of spots, so drop by the plugin homepage or use the forums if there is something you need to do with spots but aren’t sure how.

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