Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Yannick Lefebvre
Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Yannick Lefebvre

Overview of this book

WordPress is one of the most widely used, powerful, and open content management systems (CMSs). Whether you're a site owner trying to find the right extension, a developer who wants to contribute to the community, or a website developer working to fulfill a client's needs, learning how to extend WordPress' capabilities will help you to unleash its full potential. This book will help you become familiar with API functions to create secure plugins with easy-to-use administration interfaces. This third edition contains new recipes and up-to-date code samples, including new chapters on creating custom blocks for the block editor and integrating data from external sources. From one chapter to the next, you’ll learn 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, followed by recipes covering how to design administration panels, enhance the post editor with custom fields, store custom data, and even create custom blocks. You'll safely incorporate dynamic elements into web pages using scripting languages, learn how to integrate data from external sources, 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 (15 chapters)

Chapter 6: Extending the Block Editor

As mentioned a few times thus far, a large evolution in WordPress functionality came in version 5.0 with the introduction of the Block Editor, also well known by its development codename, Gutenberg. While the original page editor was quite functional and had been supporting content creators for many years, it did not provide full What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) functionality. More specifically, users building a complex website were often required to use shortcodes that are only seen once a page is saved and viewed on the site, or even had to type in HTML code. Of course, many third-party plugins (Visual Composer, WPBakery, Elementor, Divi, and so on) saw this as an opportunity to provide more advanced page building interfaces, eventually leading to the WordPress development team creating their own solution with the block editor.

The block editor introduced a new content creation paradigm with an array of building blocks that can be added...