At Human Made‘s pre WordCamp UK retreat this week at Coniston Water, Herb Miller ( bobbing wide / oik-plugins ) asked Joe Hoyle ( Human Made ) to write some simple PHP to demonstrate the [bw_api] shortcode, from the oik-shortcodes plugin, to create dynamic API documentation of some code.

Joes’s example – a PHP API

ob_start();
 

Herb’s example – an oik base API

$id = bw_array_get( $atts, "id", null );
 

Technical notes

When asked how it worked I simply said “magic”. Actually, it uses a standard PHP function to parse the code, token_get_all(), then some other functions to process these. If you can read PHP code and can click on links then you can find out for yourself. Just follow through the APIs. The really hard work is in the loading of all the APIs for each of the plugins; a batch process that’s run twice for each new plugin version. It’s run twice in order to be able to produce the “called by” list.

See also

Shortcodes

[bw_api]

APIs

• bw_array_get() – Return the array[index] or array->index (for an object) or a default value if not set
• oikai_apiref() – Implement the [bw_api] shortcode
• oikai_handle_token_T_STRING() – Handle a T_STRING token

Plugins

oik-plugins oik-themes oik-shortcodes oik

Further reading

Example: demonstrating the [bw_api] shortcode