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

Demystifying Ajax


Ajax is a technology that allows web pages to dynamically perform actions or updates. This allows for a higher level of user interactivity that we can see in popular applications such as Google Maps or Gmail.

Since its introduction in 2005, Ajax has stood out as an excellent addition to the web developer's arsenal, but several developers have been reluctant to use it due to certain initial problems and cross-browser compatibility issues.

Fortunately, today these issues are gone thanks to high-level libraries such as jQuery that take care of all Ajax calls internally and give us a simple to use API.

Simple example of using Ajax

Now that we have a pop up in place, we need to fill it with data from the RSS feeds. We have already learned how to parse RSS so all we have to do is create a function to display several posts from a feed at once, and fill our pop up with this information using Ajax.

Time for action — Use Ajax to dynamically retrieve feed posts

In order to work, Ajax...