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

Building custom shortcodes


The process of building custom shortcodes is not as complex as many people think. The minimal implementation of a shortcode requires only few lines of code as shown in the diagram in the last section. A shortcode consists of four main parts:

  • Opening and closing tags: Opening and closing tags are similar to HTML, WordPress shortcodes have opening and closing tags using square brackets. These tags are used by content creators to add the functionality into posts or pages. On the other hand, developers need to use this tag to register a shortcode as a unique element. Some of the shortcodes don’t have a closing tag and use a self-enclosing opening tag. 
  • Attributes: Attributes is a collection of data and settings required to process the functionality within the shortcode function and return the output. The list of attributes starts after the shortcode name in the opening tag. Each attribute has a key and values, as shown in the structure of a shortcode image. The attributes...