Machine Language

Toggles human and machine language (aka ID-s) on admin pages.

Only for development!

This plugin shows you the ID-s of almost all form fields including selects, checkboxes and radio buttons like in wp-admin/options.php.

It works only on WordPress Settings API-like formatted — not necessarily API generated — admin pages. E.g. elements cannot be wrapped in .

Activation

You can find the plugin’s checkbox in standard Screen Options (upper right corner). This checkbox could be overwritten — thus hidden — by poorly written plugins. To restrict Machine Language to a certain admin page, copy this to your wp-config.php:

define( 'MACHINE_LANGUAGE_HOOK', 'load-options-reading.php' ); 

For example this line causes to run only on Settings / Reading.

Features

• Basically all input ID-s are displayed in place of labels, actually for attributes of labels
• select-s get a title showing all option values comma separated (hover over select-s with your mouse)
• option-s get values appended in the form of “original option text|value”
• Radio button labels will show: “name|value”
• Descriptions (p-s and span-s with “description” class) will be hidden, this way Machine Language will clean up all admin pages, descriptions are hidden by CSS, so there’s no FOUC

Other notes

• Radio buttons or checkboxes with empty value are displayed with the “Empty Set” Unicode character: “? ” (U+2205) ( e.g. Settings / Permalinks / Default )
• select-s with empty values are not
• The plugin’s checkbox in Screen Options is effective immediately
• The code is designed as a must use plugin, so there is no separated Javascript or CSS file
• State of Machine Language is saved as a user option so it is a per user setting

Links

Development goes on on GitHub.

This section describes how to install the plugin and get it working.

1. Upload machine-language.php to the wp-content/mu-plugins/ or wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress (if you’ve chosen the plugins dir)

How can I inspect form fields not altered?

Even if your admin page is not generated by the Setting API
you should output HTML like in WordPress Settings pages.

Should I use Machine Language in production?

No, you shouldn’t.

1. 

   Setting / Reading with Machine Language turned on.

0.3.2

• Fixed checkbox handling
• WP 4.4 compatibility

0.3.1

• Code styling
• WP 4.3 compatibility
• Semver

0.3

• Initial release
• The original plugin was “Hide Descriptions”