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

Health check page


One drawback of what we have outlined here is that these tests execute during every WordPress page request. If you have written a long series of tests, they may incur some significant overhead and they can really slow down your site performance. One option is to move all your tests into a separate file that you must navigate to directly.

Perhaps you have heard of a "health check" page—all it does is run a series of tests, and if everything looks good, it prints out an "Ok" message. There are many different monitoring applications out there (for example, Nagioshttp://nagios.org/) that can be configured to take quick looks at these health check pages and verify that they are seeing the "Ok" message. If a test hits a snag, it will generate and error, and the monitoring software will notice it.

To set up a health check page, you can remove all the tests from your loader.php file and construct a new file like the following:

<?php
// Sample Health Check page
require_once( realpath...