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 9. Preparing Your Plugin for Distribution

In this chapter you will learn how to groom your plugin in preparation for publishing it to the official WordPress repository. This chapter is not about the mechanics of how to apply for a login or how to use Subversion to commit your code; those are all covered in other chapters. This chapter is all about making your plugin as good as it can be before you go through those mechanics. Specifically, we will discuss how to test and document your plugin so all your hard work may be a benefit to others.

Tip

A word of warning:

You should be aware that submitting your plugin for any public use requires some degree of responsibility. One of the worst things you can do as a developer is to distribute shoddy, untested code. It is one thing if you have thousands of lines of useless code inside the privacy of your own computer (and we have lots of that), but it's another thing entirely if you push this problematic code onto the unwitting public. Make sure...