Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Yannick Lefebvre
Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Yannick Lefebvre

Overview of this book

WordPress is a popular, powerful, and open Content Management System. Learning how to extend its capabilities allows you to unleash its full potential, whether you're an administrator trying to find the right extension, a developer with a great idea to enhance the platform for the community, or a website developer working to fulfill a client's needs. This book shows readers how to navigate WordPress' vast set of API functions to create high-quality plugins with easy-to-configure administration interfaces. With new recipes and materials updated for the latest versions of WordPress 4.x, this second edition teaches you how to create plugins of varying complexity ranging from a few lines of code to complex extensions that provide intricate new capabilities. You'll start by using the basic mechanisms provided in WordPress to create plugins and execute custom user code. You will then see how to design administration panels, enhance the post editor with custom fields, store custom data, and modify site behavior based on the value of custom fields. You'll safely incorporate dynamic elements on web pages using scripting languages, and build new widgets that users will be able to add to WordPress sidebars and widget areas. By the end of this book, you will be able to create WordPress plugins to perform any task you can imagine.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Creating a README file for your plugin


If you look at any plugins on the official WordPress repository, you will see that their page contains a lot of information, including a description of the extension, a list of frequently asked questions, and installation notes. As you may have noticed from the work that we have done so far, this data does not reside in the main plugin's code file. Instead, the official WordPress repository looks for this information in a specially formatted readme.txt file that needs to be included with the plugin.

This recipe shows how to create a readme.txt file for the Book Reviews plugin that we created in Chapter 4, The Power of Custom Post Types.

Getting ready

You should have already followed the Updating page title to include custom post data using plugin filters recipe from Chapter 4, The Power of Custom Post Types, to have a starting point for this recipe. Alternatively, you can get the resulting code (Chapter 4/ch4-book-reviews/ch4-book-reviews-v11.php) for...