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

Understanding register_post_type()


WordPress uses built-in post types for normal everyday use, but you can extend the list of available post types by using a pivotal function: register_post_type(). It is this function that allows WordPress to fulfill more traditional CMS roles. For example, you could create a custom post type for "movies" with custom fields for "plot", "genre" and "rating". The important thing to realize is that any custom post types will be visible to WordPress only if you register them using the register_post_type() function, and as you may have guessed, the only way for you to do that is inside a plugin.

To really understand what this complex function does, we really need to get our hands dirty and try using it ourselves. You guessed it, it's time for you to create another plugin.

We are naming this plugin "Content Chunks", so our first step is to create a folder named content-chunks in the wp-content/plugins folder, and then create our index.php with a valid information...