Book Image

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Book Image

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Overview of this book

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building blogs and general websites. By learning how to develop and integrate your own plugins, you can add functionality and extend WordPress in any way imaginable. By tapping into the additional power and functionality that plugins provide, you can make your site easier to administer, add new features, or even alter the very nature of how WordPress works. Covering WordPress version 3, this book makes it super easy for you to build a variety of plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is a practical hands-on tutorial for learning how to create your own plugins for WordPress. Using best coding practices, this book will walk you through the design and creation of a variety of original plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plugins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches in a series of easy-to-follow and informative steps. You will discover how to deconstruct an existing plugin, use the WordPress API in typical scenarios, hook into the database, version your code with SVN, and deploy your new plugin to the world.Each new chapter introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is packed with information, tips, and examples that will help you gain comfort and confidence in your ability to harness and extend the power of WordPress via plugins.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Format for the readme.txt file


There are only a couple more requirements for you to fulfill before you can submit your plugin to the WordPress repository. One of those requirements is that each plugin must be accompanied by a readme.txt file, and several of the other requirements can piggyback on its merits once you have written this file. We included information about writing good documentation in the previous chapter—this section has only to do with using the correct format for that documentation.

The readme.txt file uses a standardized format to describe a plugin's functionality, installation procedures, and a usage manual. Its contents are automatically parsed by the WordPress plugin repository to display an information page for each plugin—you've already seen many such pages while browsing for plugins (for example, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags).

There is a sample readme.txt file available here: http://goo.gl/lkFQ. We recommend that you copy this into your...