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VCPA Humane Pet Companion

A WordPress plugin with flexible blocks to display pets from the Venango County Humane Society. Synced with the vcpahumane.org REST API.

by Venango County Humane Society · github.com/jwincek/vcpahumane-pet-companion

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Install

No release zip yet. The repository archive installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow:

wp plugin install https://github.com/jwincek/vcpahumane-pet-companion/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
Readme github.com/jwincek/vcpahumane-pet-companion ↗

Companion WordPress plugin for friends of the Venango County Humane Society. Lets partner sites display adoptable pets pulled live from vcpahumane.org using Gutenberg blocks. Visitors who click a pet are sent back to the shelter's adoption page at /adopt/pets/{slug}/ to start the adoption process.

This plugin is read-only — it does not require API keys, does not store pet records locally, and does not duplicate the source plugin's sync logic.

Requirements

  • WordPress 6.4+
  • PHP 8.1+
  • The source site (vcpahumane.org) must keep the pet post type publicly exposed in the REST API (it is by default, via vcpahumane-petstablished-sync).

Installation

  1. Copy the vcpahumane-pet-companion directory into the partner site's wp-content/plugins/ folder.
  2. Activate VCPA Humane Pet Companion in the WordPress admin.
  3. Visit Settings → VCPA Pets to confirm the source URL and cache duration. The defaults point at https://vcpahumane.org.

Blocks

Block What it does
VCPA Featured Pets Small set of featured/randomized adoptable pets. Filterable by animal type (Dog/Cat/etc.) and attributes (special needs, good with kids, hypoallergenic, etc.).
VCPA Pet Card Embed one specific pet by name. Search the live pet list from the editor sidebar. When the pet is adopted, the block automatically becomes a "Bagel found a home!" celebration card using cached name + image.

Both blocks render server-side, share a single CSS file, and link out to the shelter's pet pages in a new tab.

Adopted-pet handling

When a Pet Card is first inserted, the editor caches the pet's name, image, and alt text as block attributes. After the pet is adopted and removed from the source site, the block falls back to those cached values to show a celebration state — so blog posts featuring "Bagel needs a home" gracefully become "Bagel found a home!" without partner site editors needing to do anything.

Caching

Pet data is cached in transients keyed by query args. The default TTL is 6 hours, configurable on the settings page. Admins can also flush the cache from that page if a partner needs to force a refresh after a major update at the shelter.

Architecture notes

  • includes/class-client.php — wraps wp_remote_get against /wp-json/wp/v2/vcps_pet?_embed, normalizes results to a small shape, and caches per-query in transients. Maintains an index option so the cache can be flushed cleanly without scanning all transients.
  • includes/class-settings.php — Settings API page for source URL, link domain, and cache TTL.
  • includes/render-helpers.php — shared vcpa_pet_companion_render_card() used by all three blocks for visual consistency.
  • blocks/*/render.php — each block is a thin server-rendered wrapper that calls the client and emits cards. No JS bundle, no editor build step needed beyond what register_block_type provides via block.json.

Development

There is no build step. Edits to PHP, block.json, and assets/style.css take effect immediately. The plugin assumes the source site's pet CPT rewrite slug remains adopt/pets; if that ever changes, update VCPA_Pet_Companion_Client::pet_url().