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

The decalog of documentation


The following is a checklist of actions for you to go through to help ensure that your plugin's documentation is reasonably sound.

  1. Include full examples. Short little code fragments are only relevant after you've demonstrated a full example. Zoom out a little bit and include a couple of lines of code before and after your example—they are invaluable in helping to put your examples into context. Take the time to demonstrate a few use-cases, and don't be cheap. If people repeatedly ask you how to do something related to your plugin, you should thank them for the interest and demonstrate a viable solution. Remember that they are asking you for a phrase, not a definition—an example demonstrates how to perform a specific task in its entirety. Assume that your audience is knowledgeable, but pretend they have had five or six beers, so you have to be extra clear in your explanations.

  2. At the top of each file, include a brief description that identifies what it is and what...