I take the chance to promote a one-pager I just published: WordPress Theme Development Cheatsheet.

It contains handy snippets for reference while making awesome WordPress themes.

Any suggestions/modifications are welcome! =)

This is very useful snippet, that removes the situation in which a header happens to be a bit too wide, and the last word will wrap to next line. This piece of code add a non-breaking space ( ) between the last two words, so that if something wraps, it’s two words instead of one.

$title = preg_replace('/(.*)\s([^\s]+)/', '$1 $2', $original_title);

If you don’t have an idea what I’m talking about, see this fiddle.

Imagine you have an object with numerous properties, and you want to have easy access to them in your code while ensuring encapsulation for these properties. Like in the snippet below, where you want to ensure that only strings can be assigned to name:

$test = new Test();
$test->name = 'This is my name!';
$test->name = 500; // name can't be an int!

This can be easily accomplished by using the magic methods __get() and __set() of an object. In the code below, the properties of the class that extend Base can be accessed if a getter or setter method has been declared for that property. The getter or setter is simply a method with the same name as the property, prefixed with get or set.

This way you can restrict the values being assigned to these properties, and alter the values being returned by the getters.

The full example:

class Base {

    public function __get($name) {
        $method = "get$name";

        $this->checkPropertyAccess($method, $name);
        return $this->$method();
    }

    public function __set($name, $value) {
        $method = "set$name";

        $this->checkPropertyAccess($method, $name);
        return $this->$method($value);
    }

    private function checkPropertyAccess($method, $property) {
        if (!method_exists($this, $method)) {
            throw new Exception("Property '$property' not accessible");
        }
    }
}

class Test extends Base {

    private $_name;

    public function getName() {
        return $this->_name;
    }

    public function setName($name) {
        if (is_string($name)) {
            $this->_name = $name;
        }
    }
}

$test = new Test();
$test->name = 'This is my name!';
$test->name = 500;

echo $test->name;