MKP Base Diagnostic Tools

I needed a number of diagnostic tools as I developed this plugin. Here is a description of each:

Notification Tool:
This is the most powerful tool of the bunch. It allows me to:

  1. Display current contents of diagnostic log
  2. Clear contents from diagnostic log
  3. Show notifications of each type
  4. Demonstrate difference between sticky and non-sticky notifications
  5. Show how to create notifications in either PHP (on the server) or in JavaScript (in the browser)
Shortcode Error Detection:
This tool shows examples of poorly formed shortcodes and how the plugin detects and reports them.
Argument Tester:
Parsing shortcodes turned out to be a bit hairy. I didn’t have any formal tools for language parsing at my fingertips, so I created my own. This tool tests various forms of shortcodes to make sure they are handled correctly.
Show Site Options:
This tool searches the options table for a match on the filter value (e.g. for options that begin with “mkp”) and displays them. This was extremely difficult to build and getting it working was a royal pain that took me way longer than it should have because WordPress is very strange about how it handles options on a single site versus a multisite network like we have for mkpusa.org.
Base Options Tester:
I ran into a nasty problem with options not being updated properly. After several days of testing, I got this tool working and it now tests creating and reading options from a single boolean field like ‘true’ to a complex nested associative array.
Multisite Information:
This tool shows shows how to use four simple shortcodes to display information about the current site. It does not have any use outside a multisite network.
Configuration:
This tool is a convenient place to put all of the shortcodes needed to configure a site in the multisite network. Just edit the codes as necessary and then run it to setup the site.