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

Double check your interface


Going into round two with our previous punching bag, Clippy the Office assistant was doubly bad because disabling it required jumping through a few unnecessary hoops. In Office 2k/XP, killing Clippy required at least four mouse clicks, and in Office 97, it was nearly impossible to disable the eager assistant. Many people found it easiest to bypass the user interface entirely and just rename the appropriate folder on the hard drive (it was "Actors" for those of you having a nostalgic flashback).

If your users are having trouble finding their way around your plugin, then you should consider some other ways of implementing the user interface. You could switch the brake pedal with the accelerator pedal and your car would still work, but anyone who drove it would be more likely to have an accident. It takes time and intuition to figure this out, but try to put options and menus where the user expects to see them. This is one of the last chances you have to adjust your...