You're reading from WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook Explore the complete set of tools to craft powerful plugins that extend the world's most popular CMS

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2022

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801810777

Length 420 pages

Edition 3rd Edition

Languages

JavaScript

Tools

WordPress

Concepts

CMS

Author (1):

Yannick Lefebvre

View More author details

Table of Contents (15) Chapters

Preface

1. Chapter 1: Preparing a Local Development Environment

2. Chapter 2: Plugin Framework Basics FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 3: User Settings and Administration Pages

4. Chapter 4: The Power of Custom Post Types

5. Chapter 5: Customizing Post and Page Editors

6. Chapter 6: Extending the Block Editor

7. Chapter 7: Accepting User Content Submissions

8. Chapter 8: Customizing User Data

9. Chapter 9: Leveraging JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX Scripts

10. Chapter 10: Adding New Widgets to the WordPress Library

11. Chapter 11: Fetching, Caching, and Regularly Updating External Site Data

12. Chapter 12: Enabling Plugin Internationalization

13. Chapter 13: Distributing Your Plugin on WordPress.org

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Validating widget configuration options

The widget configuration panel that was put in place in the previous recipe is functional and allows users to change options and save updated values in the website database. That being said, all WordPress does by default when the user saves a widget is store values directly in the site database. Accepting user data blindly is never a good idea and can lead to functionality problems and security risks if wrong or malicious values are entered. Therefore, it is preferable to add data validation rules through the creation of an update method that will be able to verify configuration data before it is saved.

Getting ready

You should have already followed the Displaying widget configuration options recipe to have a starting point for this recipe. Alternatively, you can get the resulting code (ch10/ch10-book-review-widget/ch10-book-review-widget-v2.php) from the book's GitHub page and rename the file to ch10-book-review-widget.php. You should...