Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By : Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By: Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake

Overview of this book

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and is the ideal way to share your knowledge with a large audience or build a profitable business. Getting started with WordPress development has often been a challenge for novice developers, and this book will help you find your way. This book explains the components used in WordPress development, when and where to use them, and why you should be using each component in specific scenarios. You begin by learning the basic development setup and coding standards of WordPress. Then you move into the most important aspects of the theme and plugin development process. Here you will also learn how themes and plugins fit into the website while learning about a range of techniques for extending themes and plugins. With the basics covered, we explore many of the APIs provided by WordPress and how we can leverage them to build rapid solutions. Next, we move on to look at the techniques for capturing, processing, and displaying user data when integrating third-party components into the site design. Finally, you will learn how to test and deploy your work with secure and maintainable code, while providing the best performance for end users.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Extending Plugins with Addons, Filters, and Actions

uildingsites with WordPress involves using existing plugins or creating your own plugins. You should be able to extend existing plugins with new features as well as make your plugins extendable for other developers. We use addons to extend the functionality of a core plugin. So, it's important to keep your plugins extendable so that you can later use addons to add or remove functionality. On the other hand, using and customizing existing plugins with addons allows you to provide low-cost and quality solutions. So, you need to master the techniques of building addons for customizing plugin features as well as integrating multiple plugins.

In this chapter, we explain the importance of addons while following the step-by-step guide to creating an addon for a plugin. WordPress uses a hook-based architecture and hence the built-in hooks are executed in a predefined sequence. We look at the proper execution of these hooks to prevent...