This chapter ties together several of the core concepts from previous chapters, while investigating WordPress' capabilities as a CMS. It also covers a few extra tricks, including shortcodes, creating a link to your plugin's settings page, and how to clean up when someone uninstalls your plugin.
The task before us is to tap into WordPress' CMS abilities by using the register_post_type()
function. Judging by the difficulties tracked in the SVN repository as WordPress 3.1 got ready for launch, it seems that we weren't the only ones who experienced difficulties in wrestling with WordPress' CMS capabilities.
A word of warning: this function is difficult to use and lacks good documentation, and exploring its full capabilities is beyond the scope of this chapter. If you want to examine a fuller implementation of custom post types and what they can do, have a look at one of our plugins (http://goo.gl/cgJDU)—this is the plugin we wrote for early drafts of this chapter,...