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

Using AJAX to dynamically update partial page contents


When users create complex websites with lots of dynamic content, such as Twitter widgets or other components that fetch external data, refreshing the entire page every time a user interacts with the website can quickly become a gruelling experience for visitors.

In such situations, using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) can greatly accelerate user navigation by only displaying subsets of data on visitor-facing pages and dynamically retrieving updates to isolated sections. More specifically, AJAX allows the browser to send requests to a web server, including data parameters, and to insert the data that it receives back in the web page, replacing or augmenting the original content.

This recipe shows how to add AJAX support to the bug tracking system created in Chapter 8, Creating Custom MySQL Database Tables.

Getting ready

You should have already followed the Importing data from a user file into custom tables recipe in Chapter 8, Creating...