Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

If you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of WordPress plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Widgets, plug-ins that alter your post output, present custom "views" of your blog, and more. WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner's Guide) focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plug-ins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches, in a series of carefully picked, easy-to-follow tutorials. You will discover how to use the WordPress API in all typical situations, from displaying output on the site in the beginning to turning WordPress into a CMS in the last chapter. In Chapters 2 to 7 you will develop six concrete plug-ins and conquer all aspects of WordPress development. Each new chapter and each new plug-in introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. This book is written as a guide to take your WordPress skills from the very beginning to the level where you are able to completely understand how WordPress works and how you can use it to your advantage.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
WordPress Plugin Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Social Bookmarking

I hope the first chapter got you warmed up and prepared for WordPress plugin development, and that you are as eager to start as I am.

In this chapter, we will create our first functional WordPress plugin and learn how to interact with the WordPress API (this is the WordPress interface to PHP) on the way. The knowledge you will gain in this chapter alone will allow you to write a lot of similar plugins.

Let's get moving! In this chapter, you will learn:

  • Creating a new plugin and having it displayed in the plugins admin panel

  • Checking the WordPress version and control activation of the plugin

  • Accessing API features—for example the title and permalink URL of each post

  • Using WordPress hooks to execute your plugin code when it's needed

  • Using conditional tags to control the flow of your plugins

You will learn these by:

  • Creating a 'social bookmarking' type of plugin that adds a Digg button to each post on your blog

As you probably know, Digg is a very popular service for promoting...