Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Yannick Lefebvre
Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Yannick Lefebvre

Overview of this book

WordPress is one of the most widely used, powerful, and open content management systems (CMSs). Whether you're a site owner trying to find the right extension, a developer who wants to contribute to the community, or a website developer working to fulfill a client's needs, learning how to extend WordPress' capabilities will help you to unleash its full potential. This book will help you become familiar with API functions to create secure plugins with easy-to-use administration interfaces. This third edition contains new recipes and up-to-date code samples, including new chapters on creating custom blocks for the block editor and integrating data from external sources. From one chapter to the next, you’ll learn how to create plugins of varying complexity, ranging from a few lines of code to complex extensions that provide intricate new capabilities. You'll start by using the basic mechanisms provided in WordPress to create plugins, followed by recipes covering how to design administration panels, enhance the post editor with custom fields, store custom data, and even create custom blocks. You'll safely incorporate dynamic elements into web pages using scripting languages, learn how to integrate data from external sources, and build new widgets that users will be able to add to WordPress sidebars and widget areas. By the end of this book, you will be able to create WordPress plugins to perform any task you can imagine.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "The widget method starts by calling the standard PHP extract function on the first parameter received, an array named $args, which contains a list of styling tidbits to render the widget."

A block of code is set as follows:

class Book_Reviews extends WP_Widget {
    function __construct () {
        parent::__construct( 'book_reviews', 
            'Book Reviews',
            array( 'description' =>
                   'Displays list of recent book reviews' ) );
    }
} 

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

</tr><tr>
<td colspan="2">
<div class="g-recaptcha"
data-sitekey="[my-site-key]"></div>
</td>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

npm install --save-dev --save-exact @wordpress/scripts

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "Publish the new page and click on View Page to see the block on your development site."

Tips or Important Notes

Appear like this.