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

Documentation and support


Creating documentation for your plugin is a crucial step, especially if you are developing a plugin for public release.

Some plugin authors, in a hurry to release their plugin, may choose to skip this step, resulting in poor or inadequately prepared 'readme' files. This is bad practice because usually the success of the plugin greatly depends on the available documentation.

Plugin readme file

To prepare documentation for the public release of a plugin, you need to complete two steps.

  1. Create a plugin readme.txt file.

  2. Prepare a page on your site (if you do not have a site you can use the WordPress plugin repository instead—we will discuss this later).

The readme.txt file is a standardized text file describing the plugin functionality, installation and usage manual.

The contents of a readme.txt file are automatically parsed by the WordPress plugin repository to display a plugin information page that looks like this one:

Time for action — Create a sample plugin readme.txt...