Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By : Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By: Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake

Overview of this book

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and is the ideal way to share your knowledge with a large audience or build a profitable business. Getting started with WordPress development has often been a challenge for novice developers, and this book will help you find your way. This book explains the components used in WordPress development, when and where to use them, and why you should be using each component in specific scenarios. You begin by learning the basic development setup and coding standards of WordPress. Then you move into the most important aspects of the theme and plugin development process. Here you will also learn how themes and plugins fit into the website while learning about a range of techniques for extending themes and plugins. With the basics covered, we explore many of the APIs provided by WordPress and how we can leverage them to build rapid solutions. Next, we move on to look at the techniques for capturing, processing, and displaying user data when integrating third-party components into the site design. Finally, you will learn how to test and deploy your work with secure and maintainable code, while providing the best performance for end users.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Creating addons for plugins


The process of creating addons is similar to the process we used for plugins. However, the possibility of creating an addon depends on the quality of the code in the core plugin. The core plugin should either provide an API to build addons or necessary hooks for extension. As many plugins don't contain a separate API, most addons are built by using the existing hooks. Let's see how we can create an addon for the post attachments plugin created in the previous chapter. Assume that we have the following requirements to be developed as an addon:

  • Restrict attachment file types based on default WordPress user roles. Let's provide PDF file access only for non-subscriber members and all other file types to all users in the site.
  • Download counter for attachments. We have to count the number of downloads for all attachments of a post, separately for guest users and logged-in users.

In order to implement such requirements without touching the core plugin files, we need to...