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

Creating our plugin


Now that we have a working mockup, we can finally create our plugin. As before, we will start with a simple outline and then flesh it out. This time, however, we're going to introduce a new structure for our plugin and its related files, including several directories and PHP classes. Learning good organization and some object-oriented structures is an important step in your education as a developer.

We are choosing the name "Live Search" for our plugin, so our first step is to create a directory named live-search inside the wp-content/plugins/ directory.

Inside that directory, we recommend the following items:

  • An index.php file which houses the Information Header for the plugin

  • A directory for style sheets, named css

  • A directory for images, named images

  • A directory for included PHP files, named includes

  • A directory for JavaScript files, named js

  • A directory for tests, named tests

You may not need all these directories for this plugin, but it is a useful structure.

Before we...