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

Adding menu items leading to external pages


While the WordPress plugin repository offers a number of useful sections under each plugin's page to host important information, including its description, FAQs, screenshots and support forums, a number of developers prefer to move documentation, FAQs, and even support to their own website. This allows them to create more feature-rich content for these sections and to create a more customized brand experience, especially in the case of plugins that offer free and premium versions.

This recipe shows how to add menu items that will lead users to external web pages.

Getting ready

You should have already followed the Creating a multi-level administration menu recipe to have a multi-level menu in place in your administration interface and the resulting plugin should still be active. Alternatively, you can get the resulting code (Chapter 3/ch3-multi-level-menu/ch3-multi-level-menu.php) from the downloaded code bundle.

How to do it...

  1. Navigate to the ch3-multi...