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

Adding custom help pages


As descriptive as field labels can be, a good plugin always needs to be accompanied by a set of documentation to allow users to quickly understand how to activate the plugin and perform the right steps to get the expected results. While a ReadMe file is often what developers first think of producing, users almost never read an external file or instructions on the official WordPress plugin page, they just install the plugin and try to figure it out by themselves.

To address this concern, WordPress introduced the ability to create elaborate multi-section help pages right in the plugin's administration pages to enable users to quickly get answers to their questions. This recipe shows you how to register the appropriate callback function to add a help section to your plugin configuration page, containing multiple tabs of information.

Getting ready

You should have already followed the Displaying a confirmation message when options are saved recipe, and the resulting plugin...