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

Creating custom panels in the editor screen


The first part of our plugin will cover integration of images into the WordPress Write Post screen.

We want to add a custom panel, which we will use later to display the search results.

Time for action — Create a new plugin outline

Let's start building our plugin by creating a PHP class, and then adding functionality to create a custom panel.

  1. Create a new folder called insights.

  2. Create a new file, insights.php.

    <?php
    /*
    Plugin Name: Insights
    Version: 0.1
    Plugin URI: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/insights
    Author: Vladimir Prelovac
    Author URI: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir
    Description: Quickly find relevant posts and Flickr images for your article
    */
    global $wp_version;
    $exit_msg='Insights for WordPress requires WordPress 2.6 or newer. <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_ WordPress">Please update!</a>';
    if (version_compare($wp_version,"2.6","<"))
    {
    exit ($exit_msg);
    }
    // Avoid name collisions.
    if...