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 4. The Wall

As you may have noticeed, this chapter carries the name of a famous album, which rocked the music world back in 1982. The artists used an unusual mix of music and film to produce an exceptional piece of art.

In this chapter, we will be using the same mixed approach, by taking advantage of creative WordPress and JavaScript techniques, in order to create an Ajax powered 'Wall' for your blog's sidebar.

We will be relying on what we have learned so far—WordPress hooks, API calls, and jQuery. We will also introduce a way to use built-in WordPress functionalities to achieve our project goals—saving both effort and time.

This chapter will introduce quite a few interesting techniques such as:

  • Creating a special type of plugin—the Widget

  • Storing the wall comments in the database—working with WordPress database

  • Enter data in the form and updating the wall dynamically—Ajax form submit

You will learn these techniques by:

  • Creating the Wall widget that appears in your blog's side bar. Users...