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...