Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

If you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of WordPress plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Widgets, plug-ins that alter your post output, present custom "views" of your blog, and more. WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner's Guide) focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plug-ins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches, in a series of carefully picked, easy-to-follow tutorials. You will discover how to use the WordPress API in all typical situations, from displaying output on the site in the beginning to turning WordPress into a CMS in the last chapter. In Chapters 2 to 7 you will develop six concrete plug-ins and conquer all aspects of WordPress development. Each new chapter and each new plug-in introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. This book is written as a guide to take your WordPress skills from the very beginning to the level where you are able to completely understand how WordPress works and how you can use it to your advantage.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
WordPress Plugin Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

The main concepts behind the Wall plugin


Before we start with our plugin, let's take a moment and create a design outline covering the main areas of the plugin.

  • Widget: Obviously, the first thing on our list is to create a sidebar area for the wall. We will use WordPress widget API to do that.

  • Wall Comments: We will store the user comments in the WordPress database.

  • Comment Management: The administrator needs to be able to access comments, and approve, disapprove, or delete them.

  • Security and Spam protection: Being on the front page and on most other pages of our site, the wall is exposed to various threats. We need to think of a way to protect our blog from unwanted spam.

  • Options and Styling: Last but not least, we want to be able to customize the look of the widget. Since the wall will be constrained within a relatively small area (the sidebar), we need to carefully plan the look and the functionality of the widget.

The main development concerns here are the management of comments, and...