[wp-hackers] Fwd: [GSoC - 2014] Introducing Myself

[Ian Dunn]

Hi Deven, sorry for the delayed response, but it sounds like you're 
heading in the right direction :)


 > The Form Builder Meta
 > Box will help the user to build the Forms. As soon as the User Clicks the
 > 'Add New Element' button, the 'New Element' Box Pops up. User Fills 
out all
 > the Properties related to this Element which will include all the
 > conditions, custom error msgs, parent field  and all
 >   and clicks 'Add'

Popups are almost always a bad idea because users hate them and most 
browsers block them, so instead you'd want to use a modal box. The Core 
API provides one that can be used by plugins.

It's also worth considering if it'd be better to just do everything 
inline, but a modal may be a better approach depending on how much data 
will need to be collected about each element, etc.


 > The Plugin may also provide an option to add a few lines before the 
actual
 > form starts. For example, the lines written in the text
 > box shown in the right!

That's probably unnecessary, since the user can just add that to the 
page itself before they add the shortcode that renders the form.



> Then as the User clicks Save the Form. The Handler.php(in the Plugin
> Folder) finalizes everything and passes the Form_ID into post_content which
> plugin will use to display the Form when a Responder sees it.

WP already provides a standard AJAX handler (/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php), 
so it's best to use that instead of a custom one.



It's great to see that you're very enthusiastic about the project, but 
I'd caution against getting too deep into it at this stage. Once we 
accept an application, we'll get into more detail about the project 
specs and work through some things that still need to be decided, so any 
code you write today may not be applicable tomorrow.

I think that, right now, any potential applicant would be better served 
by spending their time learning to implement the fundamental features 
that are common in plugins, and also brushing up on best practices for 
WordPress development.

* actions and filters
* input validation / output sanitization, nonces, current_user_can()
* custom post types and custom taxonomies
* the settings api
* shortcodes
* how WP handles AJAX
* wp_cron
* multisite
* unit testing (phpunit and qunit)
* etc