jQuery to the Rescue!

I was asking around on Twitter the other day if anyone knew if wordpress.org offered a service of sorts that plugins could use to create automatic links to documentation. A few people responded with a link to the Function_Reference. While this is great resource for people, I was really looking for something that my new plugin would be able to understand.

New Plugin?

I’ve been working on creating a plugin that will list all queries at the bottom of each public-facing html document created by WordPress . I know there are a couple of solutions available, but I wanted to see if I could improve upon what was already out there. One of these improvements would be to link each function in the backtrace produced by $wpdb->caller() to the appropriate documentation page in the Codex. The best way that I could think of was to create an array that contains all known functions and then only link to these pages.

My Solution

If you view the html source of The Function_Reference, you will notice that each link to a documented function is enclosed in <tt> tags. This made me think that it might be really easy to extract all of the functions via jQuery and craft a php array from them.

1. I copied the source of the page.
2. Pasted it into a new document + saved to my machine.
3. Deleted all external script and style links.
4. Added the following lines to the head tag:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$( document ).ready( function( $ ) {
	var links = [];
	$( 'tt' ).each( function( i, e ) {
		var a = $( e ).find( 'a' );
		if( undefined !== a.attr( 'href' ) ) {
			links.push( "'" + a.text() + "'" );
		}
	} );
	if( 0 < links.length ) {
		$( 'body' ).prepend( '$codex = array( ' + links.join( ', ' ) + ' );' );
	}
} );
</script>

This code will add something very similar to the following at the beginning of your document:

$codex = array( 'get_adjacent_post', 'get_children', 'get_extended', 'get_next_post', 'get_permalink', 'get_post', 'get_post_ancestors' 'a little over 600 more functions would be here...' );

The Perfect Solution?

Not by far, but it was rather easy to implement. Of course it will not reflect when changes have been made to the Codex, but that’s something I can live with for the time being.