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 8. Development Goodies

Plugin development does not end with a finished plugin—depending on the plugin's purpose there are several more phases a plugin author needs to consider.

This chapter will cover additional steps involved in localizing, documenting, publishing, and promoting the plugin. It will also cover useful tips and ideas to further improve your general WordPress knowledge.

In this chapter, you will learn about:

  • Handling localization files

  • Managing documentation and providing support

  • Managing your plugin using SVN and publishing it to the WordPress Plugin Repository

  • Distributing and promoting your plugin

  • Staying up-to-date by working on the latest development version of WordPress

The final sections of the chapter are devoted to information about WordPress MU development and other useful online resources.