Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By : Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By: Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake

Overview of this book

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and is the ideal way to share your knowledge with a large audience or build a profitable business. Getting started with WordPress development has often been a challenge for novice developers, and this book will help you find your way. This book explains the components used in WordPress development, when and where to use them, and why you should be using each component in specific scenarios. You begin by learning the basic development setup and coding standards of WordPress. Then you move into the most important aspects of the theme and plugin development process. Here you will also learn how themes and plugins fit into the website while learning about a range of techniques for extending themes and plugins. With the basics covered, we explore many of the APIs provided by WordPress and how we can leverage them to build rapid solutions. Next, we move on to look at the techniques for capturing, processing, and displaying user data when integrating third-party components into the site design. Finally, you will learn how to test and deploy your work with secure and maintainable code, while providing the best performance for end users.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction to custom post types


Custom post types were introduced in WordPress 3.0 as a solution for managing different content needs beyond the default posts. However, the name custom post types is ambiguous as we may grasp it as a different type of normal posts. Ideally, we should consider it as a custom content type, as it provides features flexible enough to handle complex content types such as products, properties, and events. Custom post types are stored in the wp_posts table by default. Prior to the introduction of custom post types, we had to use a considerable amount of filters and conditions in code to keep different post types separate from each other. This might have been a nightmare for many developers when managing a number of different content types in the same site.

Introduction of custom post types has dramatically expanded the capabilities of WordPress as a framework for developing sites with advanced data requirements and logic. Modern themes and plugins have utilized...