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)

Adding tooltips to admin page form fields using the TipTip plugin

Documentation is a very important step of plugin development. 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 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 visit 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 appears contextually based on the currently selected field.

Getting ready

You...