documenting wordpress plugin creation

even since the days of impossible creatures i like to combine two things and see what will happen, now i am combining two things that i like – creating wordpress plugins and documenting by free writing. lets see what will happen.

the plugin

so, i am gonna build a simple plugin, it will be mostly used in the block editor and its functionality will be as followes:
turn heading blocks into a HTTP URI fragment. with the option to toggle it on or off for each block, and maybe later a global toggle.

the environment

i realy wanted to use wp-env for this, but i ran into problems and didnt want to handle node issues, so i am just using good old localwp.

the scaffold

i realy want to make this plugin in wordpress coding standards, and make it the vanilla way of creating a wp plugin, so i used the trusted wp-cli tool.

wp scaffold plugin head-to-head --prompt

was the line i entered into my terminal and after some prompting from the wp-cli side, i was up-and-running with a new plugin starter kit.

out of the box i got some stuff i dont know or do know but havent used.

.editorconfig – i know what it is, but didnt got a chance to use yet
.gitignore – know and using
gruntfile.js – heard about grunt, i understand what it is but didnt used it. ill probably delete it
package.json – related to grunt i guess
.distignore – dont know what this is
readme.txt – a readme, a long one, i will not use it one
and ofcourse head-to-head.php which is the main file of the plugin, the only one needed actually

i dont know if using wp scaffold was a good choice, i could have used my AI coder to spit up some wp plugin data and start, but i want to do it "the wordpress way", whatever it is…

the plan

add filter to the render_block hook – to render the <a> tag to wrap the heading
add filter to registerBlockType hook – to add attribute to hold the value of the id of the heading

i got stuck

ok great i got stuck, this means i can explore the block editor and dig through the system.

i am trying to get the id attribute in the render_block php hook. this hook has 3 parameters: the block content, the parsed block, and the block object. in the parsed block i get no attributes at all, in the block object i get only 1 paramter which is "level".

i need to find a way to get the id from the block attributes to the render_block php hook