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

Simplifying and customizing admin features


We have to use the core features as much as possible to get the maximum benefits of using WordPress for site development. This includes the use of frontend theme features, as well as the existing backend features, that mainly focuses on post-related functionality. So, it's obvious that developers need to customize these features to suit the requirements of each website. In this section, we are going to look at several customizations of commonly used backend features.

Creating custom dashboard widgets

We had a brief introduction to the Dashboard Widget API in Chapter 6, Practical Usage of WordPress APIs. Basically, a dashboard is a collection of widgets built for administration purposes. Unlike frontend theme widgets, we don't have an interface for adding or removing admin dashboard widgets. So, we have to build custom solutions to build new dashboard widgets as well as remove the existing ones. In this section, we are going to look at the process...