This is Koowa for WordPress

Yup, you can build web applications using the Koowa Framework in WordPress. It's not seamless yet, but it's in progress. Admin pretty much works. Frontend works as far as rendering content but routing doesn't work.

Installation

• Symlink or clone this repo to your WordPress plugin folder.
• Symlink /library to your koowa/code/libraries/koowa/libraries repository.
• Run this SQL:

Just replace wp_ with whatever prefix you used

CREATE TABLE `wp_koowa_pages` (
	`id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
	`component` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
	`view` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
	`layout` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
	`query` text,
	`params` text,
	PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

CREATE TABLE `wp_koowa_settings` (
	`component` varchar(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
	`settings` text NOT NULL,
	PRIMARY KEY (`component`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

• Then activate the Koowa for WordPress plugin on WordPress. You are now ready to make awesome apps in WordPress.

Making a Plugin/Component for WordPress

• Make a new folder in your WordPress plugins folder. Let's name it some-koowa-plugin.
• WordPress expects it to have a php file with the same name so make some-koowa-plugin.php
• Put the meta docblock that WordPress uses to get information about your plugin.
• Now, you have to let Koowa know that your plugin exists. Here's how you bootstrap your plugin:

Koowa components for WordPress does not use the bootstrapper chain (where it calls the bootstrapper object of each component). It's redundant and not good for performance. So do the bootstrapping within the plugin file itself using the koowa_before_bootstrap hook. There is also a koowa_after_bootstrap. As you can see, only the com:application.bootstrapper is called. That should be enough to bootstrap all Koowa plugins.

add_action('koowa_before_bootstrap', 'register_somekoowaplugin');

function register_somekoowaplugin()
{
    KObjectManager::getInstance()->setConfig('com:application.bootstrapper', array(
        'components'    => array(
            'somekoowaplugin' => array(
				// If your plugin is symlinked, do this. If not, you can simply use __DIR__
                'path'      => WP_PLUGIN_DIR.'/some-koowa-plugin',
                'adminmenu' => true
            ))
    ));
}

• See the adminmenu => true up there? That's very important for your backend.

Directory Structure of a Plugin

/admin
	/components
		/componentname
			/controller
			/etc...
			/views
				/tmpl
					adminmenu.html.php
				/whateverview
					html.php
					/tmpl
						default.html.php
/site
	/components
		/componentname
			/controller
			/etc...
			/views
				/whateverview
					html.php
					/tmpl
						default.html.php
						default.json
/media
plugin-file.php

What is adminmenu.html.php?

That's where you put your menus for the backend. It looks something like this:

<adminmenu view="whateverview">My Component</adminmenu>
<submenu view="settings">Settings</submenu>
<submenu view="anotherview" layout="form">Another View</submenu>

This will put menu items on your WordPress admin backend. You'll notice that it will generate a url like this: admin.php?page=componentname/view. If there is a layout, it will generate this: admin.php?page=componentname/view/layout

Frontend doesn't work yet, but here's the idea

Traditionally, you use shortcodes in WordPress to render the html of your plugin. We don't want to do that, it's slow and it's just not user friendly. So we're making it easy by "assigning" pages to views. It's similar to how Joomla! works. But since WordPress doesn't have that facility, Koowa for Wordpress will provide it. It's in the works and it's partially working. All you have to do is access the "Settings" submenu. The settings submenu will scan your site views and look for the layouts that has a corresponding .json file. It's similar to Joomla!'s layout.xml. Who uses xml nowadays!? But anyway, if found, you will see an interface that allows you to assign the layouts to WordPress Pages. More work still needs to be done on this area.

Some things you need to know

Bootstrap 3 is built in. Add it using:

<style dependencies="bootstrap"></style>

But it is namespaced so encapsulate your html within <div class="bs"></div>.

Here's how you include scripts

<script src="media://js/myscript.js" location="footer" dependencies="jquery,bootstrap"></script>

Or

<script dependencies="jquery">
	jQuery.ready(function(){
		// script there
	});
</script>

The default location of scripts is on the footer.