Custom Modules

Altis is designed in a modular way, allowing your project to turn on and off individual modules as appropriate. You can use this same infrastructure for your own custom modules, allowing you to take advantage of frameworks such as the configuration and documentation modules.

Location

Custom modules can be created in one of two ways:

• For project-specific modules, modules should be stored in the project's repository, and loaded in manually.
• For reusable modules, modules should be created as separate repositories, and published to a Composer repository.

We recommend developing modules following the project-specific guide first, then converting to reusable modules later.

Project-Specific Modules

To start a new project-specific module to your project, first create a directory for the module to live in. We recommend using content/mu-plugins/{your-module-name}, to match the commonly-used WordPress must-use plugins pattern.

Your module's file structure can be structured however you like, but we recommend following the Human Made plugin structure. This structure ensures your code remains maintainable.

There are two basic parts required to creating a module: load your module's file in using the Composer autoloader, and register your module with the Altis core. We recommend having a main entrypoint file (conventionally called load.php) which handles loading and registering your module, with other code split into functions and classes in separate files (conventionally within an inc directory).

Loading Your Module

In order to use your module, the module needs to be loaded in by the Composer autoloader. This allows the module to register itself with the Altis core, as well as load in any functions or classes it needs.

To load in your module's entrypoint file, add it to the module's configuration in your project's composer.json. For example, for a module called custom-module placed in the mu-plugins directory and with an entrypoint file called load.php, your composer.json should contain the following:

{
  "extra": {
    "altis": {
      "modules": {
        "custom-module": {
          "entrypoint": [
            "content/mu-plugins/custom-module/load.php"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

After adding this, run composer dump-autoload to regenerate the autoload files for your project.

Registering Your Module

Within your module's entrypoint file, your module needs to register itself with the Altis core. To do this, you need to add an action on altis.modules.init which calls Altis\register_module(). This function call registers the module as well as any default configuration and a callback for the module.

A basic registration call looks like:

use function Altis\register_module;

add_action( 'altis.modules.init', function () {
	register_module(
		// Module ID:
		'your-module',

		// Module directory:
		__DIR__,

		// Human-readable name:
		'Your Module',

		// Module options, as an array:
		[
			// Defaults define the default settings for the module.
			'defaults' => [
				// `enabled` is a special configuration key, which sets whether the module is
				// enabled by default or not. Defaults to "false".
				'enabled' => true,
			],
		],

		// Function to call if the module is enabled.
		__NAMESPACE__ . '\\bootstrap'
	);
} );

Your entrypoint file can declare constants or load in other files as necessary to load functions and classes. A typical entrypoint file looks like:

<?php

namespace YourProject;

use function Altis\register_module;

const DIRECTORY = __DIR__;

// Load in namespaced-functions.
require_once __DIR__ . '/inc/namespace.php';

add_action( 'altis.modules.init', function () {
	register_module(
		'your-module',
		DIRECTORY,
		'Your Module',
		[
			'defaults' => [
				'enabled' => true,
			],
		],
		__NAMESPACE__ . '\\bootstrap'
	);
} );

Module Settings

When registering your module, you pass various parameters to register_module(). These are used to control the behavior of your module.

Your module's directory is used for automated loading and parsing of documentation. The Documentation module automatically looks for a docs subdirectory within this directory and parses Markdown files from this.

The default configuration passed in integrates with the configuration system, and can be used to configure your module on different environments, or to provide an easy way to enable and disable specific functionality. Within your module, you can use Altis\get_config() to retrieve the resolved configuration; your module configuration can be accessed as get_config()[ $id ], where $id is the same ID you pass to the module registration.

Reusable Modules

For reusable modules, follow the project-specific module development process above. Reusable modules are simply regular Composer packages, so you can follow existing guides on how to publish Composer packages, or follow the Altis-specific guide below.

Once you're ready to convert your module into a reusable module, the first step is to split your module's code into a separate repository. Composer requires separate packages to be published from separate repositories.

In your new repository, your module needs a composer.json to specify dependencies, the package's name, and autoloading code. Your package should declare a dependency on the core Altis package, fixed to the major Altis version you are working with. The autoloader specification should be migrated from your project's composer.json to the module's.

The entrypoint file must be called load.php in a reusable module.

A basic composer.json could look like:

{
  "name": "company-name/your-project",
  "autoload": {
    "files": [
      "inc/namespace.php"
    ],
    "classmap": [
      "inc/",
    ]
  },
  "require": {
    "altis/core": "~1.0"
  },
  "extra": {
    "altis": {}
  }
}

The crucial portion is the extra.altis property. This will ensure the module's load.php file that contains the module registration code will only be run in the appropriate context.

For open-source packages, you should then publish this package to Packagist.

For private packages you don't want to publish publically, you can use Private Packagist or Satis; we recommend following the Composer private packages guide.

Once published, this can then be added to your project's composer.json file via the composer require command.

Next Steps

Altis is built atop the open-source WordPress CMS. In addition to custom Altis modules, you can also use third-party WordPress plugins to take advantage of the open-source ecosystem.