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

Storing style sheet data in user settings


While most common plugin options are typically presented to users as simple textboxes, checkboxes, or drop-down lists, there are instances where more text needs to be stored for user settings. A good example of this are plugin-specific style sheets, which allow users to change the visual appearance of plugin output. While loading a separate style sheet file worked well in the Loading a style sheet to format plugin output recipe in Chapter 2, Plugin Framework Basics, this approach did not give users a lot of liberty in changing these styling rules to work better with their site design, since any changes that users make to the style sheet will get overwritten when the plugin is updated using the WordPress plugin upgrade process.

A solution to this problem is to store style sheet data with the rest of the configuration options in the site database. This way, the information will remain intact when upgrades are performed. This recipe shows how to change...