Book Image

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Book Image

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Overview of this book

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building blogs and general websites. By learning how to develop and integrate your own plugins, you can add functionality and extend WordPress in any way imaginable. By tapping into the additional power and functionality that plugins provide, you can make your site easier to administer, add new features, or even alter the very nature of how WordPress works. Covering WordPress version 3, this book makes it super easy for you to build a variety of plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is a practical hands-on tutorial for learning how to create your own plugins for WordPress. Using best coding practices, this book will walk you through the design and creation of a variety of original plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plugins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches in a series of easy-to-follow and informative steps. You will discover how to deconstruct an existing plugin, use the WordPress API in typical scenarios, hook into the database, version your code with SVN, and deploy your new plugin to the world.Each new chapter introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is packed with information, tips, and examples that will help you gain comfort and confidence in your ability to harness and extend the power of WordPress via plugins.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


We've gone through a lot of topics in this chapter, and we've taken you step by step through a sensible development flow. Here's what we've covered:

  • Structuring a plugin: How to prepare an outline of key components and implement them slowly, allowing you to test as you go

  • Accessing post information: Different ways of obtaining data from the post such as title, permalink and content

  • Checking WordPress version: How to check that our plugin is compatible with the user's version of WordPress

  • Using WordPress hooks: How to use actions and filters to get to trigger functions in our plugin

  • Include external JavaScript files in your plugins using WordPress' wp_register_script() and wp_enqueue_script() functions

Now that we've learned a bit more about WordPress hooks, the API, and how to handle some of the external files, we are ready to look at some more complex code patterns. We will do this in the next chapter as we improve upon the built-in WordPress search feature.