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

Capturing and displaying information using custom meta boxes


The WordPress post and page editors are organized in a series of collapsible sections with headers called meta boxes. While WordPress is mainly responsible for populating these containers with all of the appropriate elements, plugin developers can insert their own sections by registering user meta boxes.

To demonstrate this capability, this recipe shows how to add a custom meta box that will be used to display and capture information about the name and web address of the source materials used when writing a new post or page entry.

Getting ready

You should have access to a WordPress development environment, either on your local computer or a remote server, where you will be able to load your new plugin files.

How to do it...

  1. Navigate to the WordPress plugin directory of your development installation.
  2. Create a new directory called ch5-post-source-link.
  3. Navigate to the directory and create a text file called ch5-post-source-link.php.
  4. Open...