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 3. Live Blogroll

We learned how to set up a fully functional WordPress plugin, and use WordPress hooks to insert our code exactly when we want it.

In this chapter, we will move on and explore more cool things we can do with WordPress by livening up the default WordPress Blogroll.

The purpose of the plugin will be to display the most recent posts from the sites listed in the blogroll using a nice pop-up window. We also want to do that dynamically, using Ajax and jQuery technologies.

Do not worry if you know little about them right now. They integrate naturally with WordPress, and soon you'll consider them as being part of WordPress!

In this chapter, you will:

  • Use more hooks, more API features

  • Deal with RSS, an important aspect of blogging

  • Get familiar with jQuery and Ajax, and load the 'recent posts' dynamically

  • Learn how to make the plugin secure by using nonces

You will learn this by:

  • Creating a live Blogroll plugin that adds a 'recent posts' pop up for each blog in your blogroll

The integrated...