Chapter 1, Preparing a Local Development Environment, shows plugin developers how to install and configure an efficient development environment.

Chapter 2, Plugin Framework Basics, explains the basic mechanics of registering user functions with WordPress to be executed at key points when web pages are displayed, forming the basis of plugin creation.

Chapter 3, User Settings and Administration Pages, covers the creation of administration pages that will allow users to configure the plugins you create.

Chapter 4, The Power of Custom Post Types, empowers developers to add whole new content management sections to the WordPress environment.

Chapter 5, Customizing Post and Page Editors, demonstrates how to alter the default administration post and page editing environment to add new capabilities.

Chapter 6, Accepting User Content Submissions, allows users to submit their own content to new content sections that will be managed by your plugins.

Chapter 7, Customizing User Data, explains how to store additional information for users and how to modify site output based on this data.

Chapter 8, Creating Custom MySQL Database Tables, leverages the power of MySQL to create custom database tables in a site database to store and retrieve custom data.

Chapter 9, Leveraging JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX Scripts, makes plugin output very dynamic by using a number of popular script libraries.

Chapter 10, Adding New Widgets to the WordPress Library, indicates how to add new widgets that users will be able to easily drag and drop to add content to their web pages.

Chapter 11, Enabling Plugin Internationalization, prepares your plugin to be translated into any language to make it easier to be used by non-English speakers.

Chapter 12, Distributing Your Plugin on wordpress.org, shows you how to prepare your plugin for sharing with the global WordPress community.

Chapter 1, Preparing a Local Development Environment, walks you through all of the tools that are useful to have when developing plugins for WordPress, including a local web server, a Subversion client, and a dedicated code editor. While this book will always describe all of the steps necessary to perform its recipes, having a good understanding of WordPress will allow you to fully appreciate the information contained in these pages.

This book is for WordPress users, developers, or site integrators with basic knowledge of WordPress and PHP and an interest in creating new plugins to address their personal needs, client needs, or share new ideas with the WordPress community.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "create a text file called uninstall.php in the ch8-bug-tracker directory and open it in a code editor."

A block of code is set as follows:

add_filter( 'the_generator', 'ch2gf_generator_filter', 10, 2 );

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

 echo '<tr style="background: #FFF">'; 
 echo '<td><input type="checkbox" name="bugs[]" value="'; 
 echo intval( $bug_item['bug_id'] ) . '" /></td>';
 echo '<td>' . $bug_item['bug_id'] . '</td>';

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Here, we added an inner grid with two full-size columns; one for the Price of an item and the other will wrap up the Quantity component."

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