Introducing FluentSnippets and The Background Story

WordPress powers half of the internet, from the most popular news sites to personal hobby bloggers, using WordPress as their favorite CMS platform daily.

One of the most powerful features of WordPress is that it can be easily extended with plugins or custom codes. These custom codes are widely available on different forums, tutorial sites, StackOverflow, and from plugin authors, among others. You can add these custom code snippets in two ways: by editing the functions.php file or using a Code Snippets plugin.

Popular use cases of Code Snippet plugins

• Adding custom PHP Code to extend functionalities
• Adding Header and footer codes (Google Analytics / Pixel / Ads codes)
• Custom CSS for specific post/page types
• Custom Javascript codes
• Dynamic Content to different types of places like before/after post content or footer
• Dynamic Shortcode

Why do we build FluentSnippets?

Long story short, we manage many websites for our products, which are mostly content sites. Our content team sometimes needs to add custom functionality for content placement and dynamic content blocks, and we need a code snippets plugin as we manage our WP files via Git. We tried almost all the existing code snippets plugins and could not settle on a single one due to the design decisions made by these plugin authors. Please read the full post to understand why we had to build a better solution for our own use.

Existing Code Snippets Plugins

There are many custom code snippet plugins in the market right now and most of them are super popular combinedly at least 4M+ websites use custom code snippet plugins.

Plugin Name	Active Installations	Pricing Model	Price
WPCode – Insert Headers and Footers + Custom Code Snippets – WordPress Code Manager	2M+	Freemium	From $99/Year
Code Snippets	900K+	Freemium	From $40/Year
Insert PHP Code Snippet	100K+	Free	—
Woody code snippets – Insert Header Footer Code, AdSense Ads	80K+	Freemium	From $29/Year
Header Footer Code Manager	500K+	Freemium	From $35/Year
WPCodeBox	—	Premium	From 69/year
Advanced Scripts	—	Premium	From 19.99/year

These plugins solve the specific problems very well. I love WPCodeBox and Advanced Scripts. Both Plugins are managed by great founders and added many features in the last few years. Kudus to Ovidiu Maghetiu (WPCodeBox) & Abdelouahed Errouaguy (Advanced Scripts).

The internal architecture of these plugins

All of these plugins follow similar architecture to store and execute the code snippets and it’s not good and it’s dangerous in terms of performance and security.

Let’s see how these plugins work.

You see the problem in this design, right? All these code snippets plugins, store the snippets in the WP database, query all the snippets, and evaluate one by only on every WordPress request.

The cons of this architecture

• MySQL Database query on every request
• It’s a slow process to evaluate each snippet on the WP load
• The snippets can be altered by other plugins SQL injection Vulnerability
• It’s an anti-pattern of software architectural design. Codes should be on file like every software.

Design of FluentSnippets

At WPManageNinja, we invest considerable time and resources in building plugins that are super-optimized and well-designed. Each of our products aligns with a long-term vision, so every product we create must meet a certain level of code quality and architectural design, enabling us to manage them easily over a long period. If you are a developer, please check out the code base and internal designs of any of our plugins. I am sure you will be amazed by the design decisions we have made.

When designing the FluentSnippets plugin, we aimed to make it native and secure by design. Customer snippets should work exactly like WordPress core functions, or as if an experienced developer wrote code in a feature plugin.

Design of FluentSnippets Plugin

The design of FluentSnippets is intentionally super simple, as it should be. FluentSnippets stores code snippets in a flat file and uses code blocks in each snippet file to add metadata like a description, title, conditional logic, snippet type, and other details. We parse these data once and cache them in index.php, so there’s no need to parse these code blocks on every request. Then, at runtime, it simply includes those files in your selected action hook. Throughout this process, FluentSnippets runs zero database queries. In fact, there are no database queries in the entire plugin runtime.

With this native design, FluentSnippets is native, secure by design, and the most performant code snippets in this category.

FluentSnippets Features

In this very first version, we tried to add the features that it should have to use fully while keeping it super simple for all types of user bases.

Stand-alone Mode

The most interesting feature is the Stand-alone Mode. With this feature, you can add your snippets, activate the standalone mode, and then uninstall and delete the plugin. Despite this, your snippets will still run via the mu-plugins architecture. When you reactivate the plugin, you can manage your snippets as before.

The code editor

The code editor of FluentSnippets is simple. We have used codemirror javascript library to add the code editor. It does not have advanced features like auto-complete.

Powerful Smart Conditional Logics

We have added smart conditional logic to let you choose precisely where you want to execute your code. These conditional logics include

• User’s Login State or Role
• Type of Pages
• Post Types
• Taxonomy or Term-Based Rule
• By Page / Post URL
• Target Specific Page / Post / CPT
• Date Based Conditions
• FluentCRM Tag / Lists based rule of the current contact

These conditions are grouped-based, which means you can add multiple groups with a set of conditions, and if any of the groups match the conditions it will execute the snippet.

Powerful search and snippet Grouping

Many users add tons of snippets and finding & managing them is hard. For those types of users, we have added Snippet Group which works as a virtual folder and tags to find your desired snippet and manage. You can also search by description or title, and filter by tags. The full app is built with the Vue3 javascript library so it’s super fast by design.

Snippet Types

FluentSnippets has four types of snippets. You can choose the snippet type from the snippet type selection.

Functions – PHP Snippet: This snippet is for all the PHP code that you need to execute in specific areas like you would write in your theme’s functions.php file.

You can use this snippet type to create functions/classes, hook into other actions and filters, and more.

Content – PHP + HTML Snippet Type: This snippet type is used to insert content to different places like header, footer, after-post content, before-post content, etc. You can write php / html / js / css code in this snippet type.

CSS Snippet Type: You can use this snippet type to add custom CSS to your site.

JS Snippet Type: You can use this snippet type to add custom JS to your site.

Future of FluentSnippets

In every plugin we build, our aim is to solve problems for businesses and add immense value. We are releasing FluentSnippets with the same goal and vision. We will continue to improve, innovate, and add features that the community wants. There are a few things we plan to add to this website in the next few weeks.

• Code Snippets Library powered by the community and plugin authors
• Community Forum for Support and discissions
• Improve the Code Editor to support auto-complete
• Adding more snippet locations
• Adding more conditional logics

The source code for FluentSnippets is available on GitHub, and you are more than welcome to contribute to the code or the documentation. Alternatively, you can help us by recommending FluentSnippets to your friends and community. Together, let’s make WordPress more powerful and secure.

• Share on Facebook
• Tweet