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 tooltips to admin page form fields using the TipTip plugin


Documentation is a very important step of plugin development, as it allows users to understand how to configure the plugins you create. That being said, users will not typically go very far to find the information they need, resulting in many unnecessary questions in discussion forums or in emails.

As discussed in Chapter 3, User Settings and Administration Pages, one way to provide documentation is to create a help tab that appears in the top-right corner of the plugin's configuration panel. While that approach is much easier for users than to find a Readme file or go back to the official WordPress plugin repository, it still requires them to actively seek and click a link to open that section.

That's where tooltips come into play. Using a jQuery plugin to render clean, good looking tooltips, we can add documentation to a plugin that will be displayed contextually based on the configuration fields that the user is currently...