WordPress and Ajax: An in-depth guide on using Ajax with WordPress

The WordPress and Ajax e-book is a comprehensive view on using Ajax with WordPress. It covers Ajax like you’ve never seen before.

The book contains three real-life examples that provide the rationale and logic behind coding decisions, the reasons for Ajax’s use, and the steps from inception to completion of the examples.

First, the book builds a foundation for you to send your first Ajax request.
This includes:

• An explanation of Ajax best practices – What Ajax should do, and what it isn’t meant to do.
• How to add scripts and styles properly to WordPress – How plugin and theme authors should add scripts to WordPress. This also covers page detection and other advanced techniques.
• Properly formatting scripts using jQuery – How to adhere to the jQuery authoring guidelines for easy-to-read code and maximum compatibility.
• Localizing your JavaScript files – How to add localized JavaScript variables without using PHP.
• An explanation on how to override someone’s scripts and styles.
• WordPress security, including nonces and data validation.
• Several different Ajax techniques are explained.

After the foundation has been built, the book introduces you to sending you first request.
Sending your first request includes learning:

• Learning the code foundation for sending that first request.
• Adding server-side security for the request.
• Processing the request on the server-side.
• Responding to the request on the server-side.
• Parsing the response on the client-side.
• Outputting the data to the user.

After the foundation has been laid and you have a good idea of the theory behind an Ajax request, we begin work on the examples.

• Example 1: WP Grins Lite – We take a common and popular plugin and convert it to use Ajax for the loading of the smilies.
• Example 2: Static Random Posts – We take a common widget and add an Ajax function to it. This example will not only teach you how to create a widget, but also an admin panel, and Ajax functionality.
• Example 3: Ajax Registration Form – We take an ordinary registration form and perform data validation on it using Ajax.