There are some tools that are hard to use, and require a lot of training to use. There are others that “just work.” Tools that just work, appear to be magic, but it’s not. Either tool follows existing user interface patterns, so no new learning is needed, or it teaches the user how to use it.

At CalderaWP, we’re launching a new plugin later today, Caldera Easy Queries. It’s a tool that lets you, as a site owner, use a visual editor to create a collection of posts, and then display them with a shortcode. It’s a big interface, and all that power makes it hard to meet our goal of making it easy. We made it as visual as possible, and use lots of autocompletion to help the end user.

One of the neatest things that David, our lead developer, did was add a pop-out modal for  testing your queries. That way you can easily test your queries to see if you got it right yet. It’s a system that allows for quick and easy iteration and experimentation.

The other thing you will see in that modal, is a display of the WP_Query parameters for the query you have created, and even the SQL that it would preform. This is a really exciting thing for me, as I hope that this will become a teaching tool for new WordPress developers.

I know that learning to get my head around WP_Query was not easy for me when I started out. I still find myself spending a lot of time going back and reading the codex page for WP_Query a lot. I bet I’ll be using Easy Queries as a guide to writing my own queries.

The funny thing, is that I recently realized I actually understand SQL. It’s not a language I ever tried to learn. I learned it with the help of the query tool in phpMyAdmin. I used to have to use that to write a query. I guess I did it enough times, and watched the queries it was generating enough that it rubbed off on me.

We made this new plugin for people that don’t want to write code — and I truly think that shouldn’t be a necessity for those creating WordPress sites. That’s what technology is about, the constant progression of making complex processes easier for the untrained everyday person. But, I hope that it will help aspiring WordPress developers learn SQL and how to use WP_Query.