One of the problems encountered by users is that a plugin's settings may be difficult to locate. It's not immediately clear if a new menu item has been added when a user first activates a plugin. That's the problem we are going to solve by adding a Settings link that takes us to our plugin's administration page.
How did we do that? Well, it turns out that the information for each plugin is printed via a process that we can modify using a WordPress filter. The name of one of these secret filter hooks is plugin_action_links
. How did we know that? Thanks to the nature of open-source code, we saw it used in Viper's Video Quicktag plugin, and then we looked through his code to figure out how Mr. Viper007Bond pulled this off. We could use that same filter here, but the thing to remember is that this filter is called for each plugin listed, so if we used that filter, we would have to check to ensure that we were filtering the data for our plugin, and not another...