Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By : Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By: 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 (11 chapters)

A brief overview of WordPress APIs


WordPress API is a set of sub APIs that works together, allowing developers to build on top of core features. The individual APIs cover one or more core features, while some of the APIs can be used beyond WordPress's core features. The REST API, Rewrite API. and Shortcode API are some of the ones we can use for WordPress's core features, as well as custom features. The use of WordPress APIs reduces your workload as a developer, compared to building your own functions. Let's take a look at the advantages of using APIs in WordPress:

  • Use of actions and filters: WordPress API functions executes the necessary actions and filters within the process, allowing developers to customize the features. Using our own custom functions omits these actions and filters. Therefore, it will be difficult to combine or use many plugins together, as some of the plugins might be relying on these hooks within API functions.
  • Input validation and security: The built-in API functions...