Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Yannick Lefebvre
Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Yannick Lefebvre

Overview of this book

WordPress is a popular, powerful, and open Content Management System. Learning how to extend its capabilities allows you to unleash its full potential, whether you're an administrator trying to find the right extension, a developer with a great idea to enhance the platform for the community, or a website developer working to fulfill a client's needs. This book shows readers how to navigate WordPress' vast set of API functions to create high-quality plugins with easy-to-configure administration interfaces. With new recipes and materials updated for the latest versions of WordPress 4.x, this second edition teaches you how to create plugins of varying complexity ranging from a few lines of code to complex extensions that provide intricate new capabilities. You'll start by using the basic mechanisms provided in WordPress to create plugins and execute custom user code. You will then see how to design administration panels, enhance the post editor with custom fields, store custom data, and modify site behavior based on the value of custom fields. You'll safely incorporate dynamic elements on web pages using scripting languages, and build new widgets that users will be able to add to WordPress sidebars and widget areas. By the end of this book, you will be able to create WordPress plugins to perform any task you can imagine.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Rendering the admin page contents using HTML


Once a custom menu item has been created, WordPress will call the function associated with it when it gets visited. The assigned function's main purpose is to render a configuration page containing a form with all the options available to the user and to send the captured data back to WordPress for processing.

There are two main methods that can be used to render plugin configuration pages: straight HTML and the Settings API. This recipe explores the use of HTML to create a configuration panel, while a later recipe will show how to use the Settings API to prepare the page output.

Getting ready

You should have already followed the Creating an administration page menu item in the Settings menu recipe and the resulting plugin should still be active in your development site. Alternatively, you can get the resulting code (Chapter 3/ch2-page-header-output/ch2-page-header-output-v4.php) from the downloaded code bundle. You should rename the file ch2-page...