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

jQuery JavaScript library


There are a number of libraries available which simplify the usage of JavaScript by providing ready-made functions for the most common tasks. The most popular today are jQuery, Scriptaculous and MooTools. WordPress comes with the first two pre-installed, and we will be using jQuery for our plugins.

Implementing a mouse hover event in jQuery

Although our plugin is fine, we would like it to interact with the user and show them the information when they want it, and where they want it. Responding to the user hovering the mouse over the link on the blogroll sounds like a good place to start.

Let's create a jQuery JavaScript that will show additional information in the blogroll, using the hover event as a trigger.

Time for action — Creating a hover event with jQuery

We will create an external file to store our JavaScript and use it to display a message directly in the blogroll, when the user hovers the mouse over one of the links.

  1. Create a new file called wp-live-blogroll...