Web Tutorial: The Self-affirmations WordPress Plugin (Part 2/4)

The next part of this web tutorial involves creating a WordPress plugin. This is entirely dependent upon you having a WordPress instance installed on your server.

In essence, you create a folder (let's call it tt_selfaffirmations) under the plugins directory of the wp-content directory, then create a PHP file in there. The starting comments help WordPress identify that this is the plugin file.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

/**
* Plugin Name: Self-affirmations
* Plugin URI: http://www.teochewthunder.com
* Description: This plugin implements self-affirmations
* Version: 1.0.0
* Author: TeochewThunder
* Author URI: http://www.teochewthunder.com
* License: GPL2
*/

This next function, wc_admin_menu(), is added to the admin_menu hook. The final effect is that we will add menu items into the side menu for testing purposes.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

/**
* Plugin Name: Self-affirmations
* Plugin URI: http://www.teochewthunder.com
* Description: This plugin implements self-affirmations
* Version: 1.0.0
* Author: TeochewThunder
* Author URI: http://www.teochewthunder.com
* License: GPL2
*/

function wc_admin_menu()
{

}

add_action("admin_menu", "wc_admin_menu", 11);

In here, we call the built-in function add_submenu_page(). We use index.php as the page to which to execute the code in. The next two arguments are just the label for the link. "manage_options" is the minimum user capability required, and this particular value ensures that only admins can see the link added. "tt_get_readytoreceive" is the name of the function we will call when clicking that link, and we will create that function soon.

Here's some info on the add_submenu_page() function.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function wc_admin_menu()
{
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Readytoreceive", "Test Readytoreceive", "manage_options", "tt_get_readytoreceive", "tt_get_readytoreceive");
}

add_action("admin_menu", "wc_admin_menu", 11);

And of course, we will need to create the tt_get_readytoreceive() function.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function wc_admin_menu()
{
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Readytoreceive", "Test Readytoreceive", "manage_options", "tt_get_readytoreceive", "tt_get_readytoreceive");
}

add_action("admin_menu", "wc_admin_menu", 11);

function tt_get_readytoreceive()
{

}

If you refresh your WordPress console, you should see the new link at the sidebar.

While we're at it, we may as well create four more links.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function wc_admin_menu()
{
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Readytoreceive", "Test Readytoreceive", "manage_options", "tt_get_readytoreceive", "tt_get_readytoreceive");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Terms", "Test Terms", "manage_options", "tt_get_terms", "tt_get_terms");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Lastsent", "Test Lastsent", "manage_options", "tt_set_lastsent", "tt_set_lastsent");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Generate Email", "Test Generate Email", "manage_options", "tt_generate_mail", "tt_generate_mail");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Job", "Test Job", "manage_options", "tt_selfaffirmations", "tt_selfaffirmations");
}

We will, of course, need to create all these functions. Of all these functions, in this part of the web tutorial, we will only concentrate on the first three. These are the tests that will test the REST endpoints we created in the previous part of this web tutorial.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function wc_admin_menu()
{
add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Readytoreceive", "Test Readytoreceive", "manage_options", "tt_get_readytoreceive", "tt_get_readytoreceive");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Terms", "Test Terms", "manage_options", "tt_get_terms", "tt_get_terms");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Lastsent", "Test Lastsent", "manage_options", "tt_set_lastsent", "tt_set_lastsent");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Generate Email", "Test Generate Email", "manage_options", "tt_generate_mail", "tt_generate_mail");
    add_submenu_page("index.php", "Test Job", "Test Job", "manage_options", "tt_selfaffirmations", "tt_selfaffirmations");
}

add_action("admin_menu", "wc_admin_menu", 11);

function tt_get_readytoreceive()
{

}

function tt_get_terms()
{

}

function tt_set_lastsent()
{

}

function tt_generate_mail()
{

}

function tt_selfaffirmations()
{

}

And here's five links instead of one!

We continue with the tt_get_readytoreceive() function. We're going to use cURL to get data via the REST endpoints. Thus, we begin by calling the curl_init() function and set it to the variable cURLConnection.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_readytoreceive()
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();
}

We follow up by using the curl_setopt() function to set the variables CURLOPT_URL and CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER for cURLConnection. For CURLOPT_URL, we use the URL that we defined for the endpoint readytoreceive. And CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER has to be true.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_readytoreceive()
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive");
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
}

We then run the curl_exec() function using cURLConnection as an argument. The result is assigned to the variable json_list. After that, we use the function curl_close() just as a matter of neatness.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_readytoreceive()
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive");
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);
}

OK, so over here, we display json_list on screen.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_readytoreceive()
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive");
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
}

Run the code by clicking on the "Test readytoreceive" link. See what happens? Look familiar? If you didn't get anything, then you need to get back to the Oracle APEX database to change the LAST_SENT value back to "01/01/1970".

In case the screenshot was unclear, here's the JSON object.

{"items":[{"email":"teochewthunder@gmail.com","first_name":"Teochew","last_name":"Thunder","dob":"1977-11-05T00:00:00Z","gender":"M"}],"hasMore":false,"limit":25,"offset":0,"count":1,"links":[{"rel":"self","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive"},{"rel":"describedby","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/metadata-catalog/mailinglist/item"},{"rel":"first","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive"}]}

Well, you know what the JSON looks like now. So we use json_decode() to decode json_list, and assign the result to list. Then we return the items array from the list object.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_readytoreceive()
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive");
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    return $list->items;
}

Now we will work on tt_get_terms(). This is the function that calls the REST endpoint that returns the user's list of terms. It's largely the same as the last one, so just copy everything over first.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_terms()
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive");
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    return $list->items;
}

For this function, there is a parameter, id, which is the user's email address. We will then change the URL, and append the value of id at the end.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_terms($id)
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    return $list->items;
}

We add this line to ensure that if id is NULL, as would be the case in a test, we'll use "teochewthunder@gmail.com".

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_terms($id)
{
    $id = ($id ? $id : "teochewthunder@gmail.com");
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    return $list->items;
}

Test this. You should get the following output.

This is the JSON output. It could potentially be quite lengthy.

{"items":[{"type":"DESCRIPTIONS","term":"acidic"},{"type":"DESCRIPTIONS","term":"cynical"},{"type":"DESCRIPTIONS","term":"jolly"},{"type":"DESCRIPTIONS","term":"patient"},{"type":"DESCRIPTIONS","term":"pragmatic"},{"type":"INTERESTS","term":"comedy"},{"type":"INTERESTS","term":"programming"},{"type":"INTERESTS","term":"soccer"},{"type":"INTERESTS","term":"superheroes"}],"hasMore":false,"limit":25,"offset":0,"count":9,"links":[{"rel":"self","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/teochewthunder@gmail.com"},{"rel":"describedby","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/metadata-catalog/mailinglist/terms/item"},{"rel":"first","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/teochewthunder@gmail.com"}]}

Now, for this function, we don't want to return the entire list. We want to randomly include terms, so as to vary the output more. We begin by declaring two arrays, interests and descriptions. We'll change the returned output to an array containing the arrays interests and descriptions, named the same.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_terms($id)
{
    $id = ($id ? $id : "teochewthunder@gmail.com");
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    $interests = [];
    $descriptions = [];
    
    return ["interests" => $interests, "descriptions" => $descriptions];
}

Then we use a Foreach loop on the items array of the list object.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_terms($id)
{
    $id = ($id ? $id : "teochewthunder@gmail.com");
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    $interests = [];
    $descriptions = [];
    foreach($list->items as $i) {

    }
    
    return ["interests" => $interests, "descriptions" => $descriptions];
}

Depending on the value of the type property of the current element, add the term property to either interests or descriptions.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_terms($id)
{
    $id = ($id ? $id : "teochewthunder@gmail.com");
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    $interests = [];
    $descriptions = [];
    foreach($list->items as $i) {
        if ($i->type == "INTERESTS") $interests[] = $i->term;
        if ($i->type == "DESCRIPTIONS") $descriptions[] = $i->term;
    }
    
    return ["interests" => $interests, "descriptions" => $descriptions];
}

We then use the rand() function in each If block, giving a 50% probability of the term being added to their respective arrays.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_get_terms($id)
{
    $id = ($id ? $id : "teochewthunder@gmail.com");
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/terms/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    $interests = [];
    $descriptions = [];
    foreach($list->items as $i) {
        if ($i->type == "INTERESTS" && rand(0, 1) == 1) $interests[] = $i->term;
        if ($i->type == "DESCRIPTIONS" && rand(0, 1) == 1) $descriptions[] = $i->term;
    }
    
    return ["interests" => $interests, "descriptions" => $descriptions];
}

For the last REST endpoint, we again copy the contents of tt_get_readytoreceive() into tt_set_lastsent().

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_set_lastsent()
{
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive");
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    return $list->items;
}

As with tt_get_terms(), we add a parameter and change the URL. We'll also add the line to use "teochewthunder@gmail.com" as the default value of id.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_set_lastsent($id)
{
    $id = ($id ? $id : "teochewthunder@gmail.com");
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/setreceived/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    echo $json_list;
    
    $list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    return $list->items;
}

We don't want to display anything, or return anything.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_set_lastsent($id)
{
    $id = ($id ? $id : "teochewthunder@gmail.com");
    $cURLConnection = curl_init();

    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_URL, "https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/setreceived/" . $id);
    curl_setopt($cURLConnection, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    $json_list = curl_exec($cURLConnection);
    curl_close($cURLConnection);

    //echo $json_list;
    
    //$list = json_decode($json_list);
    
    return; //$list->items;
}

Now test this. You should get nothing in the display.

If you test the first link again, this time you should not see the user in the list, because the value of LAST_SENT has been set to today's date.

In the JSON object, you see that the items property is now an empty array.

{"items":[],"hasMore":false,"limit":25,"offset":0,"count":0,"links":[{"rel":"self","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive"},{"rel":"describedby","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/metadata-catalog/mailinglist/item"},{"rel":"first","href":"https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/teochewthunder/mailinglist/readytoreceive"}]}

This wasn't very hard, was it? We basically built on what we already created in Oracle APEX. The next part will also deal with REST endpoints, but it will be ChatGPT's REST endpoint.

Next

Generating email content using ChatGPT.