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 5. Snazzy Archives

This chapter covers the creation of a very sleek and stylish looking WordPress enhancement. The purpose of the Snazzy Archives plugin will be to present your site archives in a unique visual way.

In order to achieve this visual output, we will read all posts from the WordPress database and display them using a combination of HTML, CSS, and jQuery.

We will incorporate our plugin into a PHP class to make it easier to use and maintain. We will also learn a few template tricks and how to integrate the plugin output to WordPress pages easily.

Finally, we will create an options page so that users can control various aspects of the plugin.

In summary, this chapter will teach you how to:

  • Use a PHP class to describe your plugin

  • Use shortcode API to display output on your pages, and use custom templates when you want more control

  • Manage options for your plugin

  • Create options page and add administration menus

  • Create simple caching mechanism to speed up the output of your plugins...