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

Summary


The purpose of the Post Types plugin was to introduce you to different aspects of WordPress backend development.

While creating our different post types, we have learned how to customize WordPress menus to our liking. We used custom fields to insert important information to the post which we do not want to be visible in the post content.

We learned how to modify the Manage Posts panel to display the information we want. We also covered user capabilities, and how using them, we can make sure our plugin is working in multi-user environments.

Finally, we do not want to forget localization, for there are thousands of users who use WordPress in their native language.

Here are the most important lessons from this chapter:

  • Localization: Not everyone uses WordPress in English

  • Backend CSS classes: Use them to make your forms prettier

  • Custom fields: They are the powerhouse behind WordPress CMS capabilities

  • Customize Menus: Your plugin can choose the menus in the WordPress backend

  • Manage Panels...