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.

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WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide
Feb, 2009 | 296 pages
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Table of Contents (14 chapters)
WordPress Plugin Development
WordPress Plugin Development
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Preparing for WordPress Development
Preparing for WordPress Development
How will you benefit?
Challenges involved
Plugins developed in this book
Tools for the job
Final notes
Summary
2
Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking
Plugging in your first plugin
Displaying a Digg button
WordPress plugin hooks
Adding a Digg button using JavaScript code
Styling the output
Summary
3
Live Blogroll
Live Blogroll
Starting up with the blogroll
jQuery JavaScript library
JavaScript and WordPress
Creating the pop-up with CSS
Demystifying Ajax
4
The Wall
The Wall
The main concepts behind the Wall plugin
Creating a widget
Widget controls
Create a WordPress page from the code
Handling user input
Managing Ajax comment submit
Dynamically load comments
Ajax security
Summary
5
Snazzy Archives
Snazzy Archives
Using a class for plugin
Showing template output with shortcodes
Prepare archives
Apply styling and jQuery to archives
Creating plugin options page
Use plugin options
Caching the plugin output
Summary
6
Insights for WordPress
Insights for WordPress
Creating custom panels in the editor screen
Searching the posts
Interacting with tinyMCE
Using Flickr API
Creating a tinyMCE plugin
Summary
7
Post Types
Post Types
Handling localization
Adding a post template
Handling file and image uploads
Using custom fields
Quick post a link
Tinkering with WordPress backend menus
Programming the Manage panel
Handling error messages
User roles and capabilities
Summary
8
Development Goodies
Development Goodies
Creating Localization files
Documentation and support
Code management and plugin repository
Promotion
General plugin development guidelines
WordPress MU development
WordPress and GPL
Online resources
Summary
Index
Index

Managing Ajax comment submit

We will now expand our Ajax knowledge with Ajax submit form technique.

The principle remains the same. jQuery will respond to an event (in this case, a user submitting the form) and instead of reloading the page, it will call an external script and display the results.

Our script on the other end will receive form information, and after validation, insert the comment into the WordPress database.

Finally, we will show a status message to the user, letting them know that the comment has been accepted:

Time for action — Save the comments

In this example, we will learn how to handle submit forms using Ajax.

We will also learn how to save the comments in the WordPress database.

  1. Create the wp-wall-ajax.php file which will handle submitted form through a series of simple checks: 

    <?php
require_once("../../../wp-config.php");
if ($_POST['submit_wall_post'])
{
$options = get_option('wp_wall');
$comment_post_ID=$options['pageId'];
$actual_post=get_post($comment_post_ID...
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