WordPress Action Ticketing API

This plugin is the next step after my proposal for a common invite API. Here’s how I described it when requesting hosting at the plugin directory:

A common framework for registering tickets that will be acted upon later. Use it to manage challenge/response interactions to confirm email addresses, phone numbers, IM screen names, Twitter accounts, etc. Build an invite system around it, or use it as the foundation of a short URL system. It’s an extensible framework that takes cues from WordPress’ cron and admin Ajax functions.

Tickets are unique 1-32 character strings associated with actions and some stored data. Upon receiving a ticket, the matching action is executed with the stored data as an argument. After receiving the action, a plugin can destroy the ticket (as for challenge/response actions), or or leave the ticket in place for repeated use (like redirecting to longer post permalinks for a short URL resolver).

Here’s how it works:

Registering a ticket requires three things:

The unique string that identifies the ticket
A string representing the action that will be executed when the ticket is called
Some data that will be passed to that action when the ticket is called

And here it is in action:

$ticket = $wptix->register_ticket( 'action_name_string', $wptix->generate_md5(), array( 'data' => 'val', 'more_data' => 'another_val' ));

To actually do anything with that ticket you’ll have to also register a function associated with the action name you gave when you registered it:

add_action( 'action_name_string', 'my_function_name' );

WP Ticket Framework registers a URL base in the form of http://site.net/do/any_ticket_string, so you can call a ticket simply by visiting that URL, or you can call tickets within your code. The following demonstrates one method of handling ticket inputs as part of a larger form submission.

if( ( $ticket = $wptix->is_ticket( $_POST['phone_confirmation'] )) && $ticket->arg['user_id'] == $current_user->ID ){
 $wptix->do_ticket( $_POST['phone_confirmation'] );
}else{
 $errors->add( 'user_phone', __( "<strong>ERROR</strong>: The confirmation code is invalid." ), array( 'form-field' => 'phone_confirmation' ) );
 return;
}

Caveats:

Tickets don’t have any built in expiration mechanism. You can, however, include an expiration time in data saved in the ticket and act on that accordingly.
Tickets don’t have any built in security mechanism. If only a certain user should be allowed to call a ticket, your code needs to be aware of that and enforce it.
Tickets are deleted after being called, though you can suppress that by calling $wptix->clean_up_after( FALSE );.
Tickets can only be queried by ticket string. If your application needs to keep track of open tickets for each user (as an example) it should also make a user meta entry about it.

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