PHP WordPress Function

Hi Natashia,

I don't know anything about Wordpress. I am not a fan of the endwhile method, I prefer curly braces. Also, I try not to echo out static html, more processing time. I'm assuming the "Featured Opportunity" in the first div is just text output to the browser. Another thing, in your third to last echo statement, for example, you could have written:

<?php
echo '<p class="jump-link"><a href="" target="_blank">';
?>

So, if I wrote the function it would probably look like this:

function widget_feat_opportunity() {
  ?>
  <div class="small-8 medium-8 large-8 columns right">
  <div class="widget-title">Featured Opportunity</div>

  <?php
  while( $feat_opportunities->have_posts()) {
    $feat_opportunities->the_post();
  ?>

  <div class="row"><div class="small-4 medium-4 large-4 columns">

  <?php
  the_post_thumbnail('feat-opportunities');
  ?>

  </div><div class="small-8 medium-8 large-8 columns">

  <?php
  the_content();
  ?>

  </div></div>

  <?php
  }
  ?>

  <p class="jump-link"><a href="" target="_blank">View All Opportunities &#8811</a></p></div>

  <?php
}

?>

Jeff

Natasha McDiarmid , How Jeff framed it above is what we typically do in WP dev work. You'll see a lot of mix php and html with wordpress.

As for the "endwhile", that's the way WP core devs chose to do the loops. almost everyone you'll find uses that structure. There are some discussions out there that endwhile is better than using curly braces when doing a lot of html in the loop. Personally I still prefer the curly braces though and haven't had any trouble.

The next thing you'll run in to is having to use output buffering. I've had several occasions when writing plugins that I needed to make sure all the php processed before it started to try and spit out the html. So you may find yourself needing to use ob_start() when writing a lot of html/php mix in functions, then collecting and returning the contents of the buffering.

Thanks for all your help! Echo-ing statements was the only way I knew how to implement HTML into PHP, but I see what you did, that makes sense. However the code above is giving me an error on this line:

while( $feat_opportunities->have_posts()) {