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 plugin file and header


The first step of creating a WordPress plugin is to create a PHP file inside of the plugins directory and add the necessary information to have it recognized by the system. This first recipe shows you how to create a basic plugin file for WordPress and how to see and activate this new extension from the administration interface.

Getting ready

You should have access to a WordPress development environment, either on your local computer or a remote server, where you will be able to load your new plugin files.

How to do it...

  1. Navigate to the WordPress plugin directory (wp-content/plugins) of your development installation.
  2. Create a new subdirectory called ch2-plugin-header within the plugin directory.
  3. Navigate to this directory and create a new text file called ch2-plugin-header.php.
  4. Open the new file in a text editor and add the following text:
<?php 
/* 
Plugin Name: Chapter 2 - Plugin Header 
Plugin URI: 
Description: Declares a plugin that will be visible in the...