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

Splitting admin code from the main plugin file to optimize site performance


As mentioned in Chapter 2, Plugin Framework Basics, the entire content of the main code file of a WordPress plugin gets evaluated every time any page is rendered on the site, whether it's a visitor-facing page or a backend administration page. This means that large amounts of PHP code can potentially be parsed on every iteration, wasting processing power on the site's server, even though some of this code will never be active when regular visitors are browsing the site.

A prime example of this waste is all of the code samples that we have been building in this chapter. While this code is extremely useful for site administrators, there is no sense in having the web server parse and validate that code when regular pages are displayed. For this reason, it is better to isolate this code in a separate file which will only be loaded and parsed when someone is visiting the site's dashboard. The following recipe shows how...