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

Chapter 7. Custom Post Types

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,...