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

Expiration dates: adding options to our widget


One of the key specifications for this plugin is the ability to set how often content is refreshed. Maybe you want to include a "quote of the day" on your site, or maybe you want to update a chunk of content every hour. Each instance of our widget needs an expiration date.

How do we do that? The solution is a bit tricky, so pay attention. First, we need to add another control option to our widget that allows the managers to set how often the content expires in each widget instance. We are referring to this as the "shelf life", in keeping with some common grocery terms.

Update the ContentRotatorWidget.php file so the $control_options array has an additional option:

public $control_options = array(
   'title'               => 'Content Rotator',
   'seconds_shelf_life'   => 86400,   // 86400 seconds in a day
);

We have given it a default value of 86400; we are opting to use seconds as our refresh interval, where 86,400 seconds is equal to 24...