Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

If you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of WordPress plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Widgets, plug-ins that alter your post output, present custom "views" of your blog, and more. WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner's Guide) focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plug-ins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches, in a series of carefully picked, easy-to-follow tutorials. You will discover how to use the WordPress API in all typical situations, from displaying output on the site in the beginning to turning WordPress into a CMS in the last chapter. In Chapters 2 to 7 you will develop six concrete plug-ins and conquer all aspects of WordPress development. Each new chapter and each new plug-in introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. This book is written as a guide to take your WordPress skills from the very beginning to the level where you are able to completely understand how WordPress works and how you can use it to your advantage.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
WordPress Plugin Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Starting up with the blogroll


The WordPress Blogroll is a collection of links to other sites. You can manage these links in the WordPress administration menu where you can add, modify, and delete them. The changes are represented instantaneously on your Blogroll and are visible to the visitors of your site.

WordPress allow us to hook up into the process of preparing the blogroll links just before they are displayed on the site. We will use this as a first step in our plugin, to demonstrate how to fetch the RSS feed from the link and display the title of the first post as a link.

This will make the blogroll look livelier as it will constantly change with the posting of new articles on those sites.

Time for action — Roll into the blogroll

We want to hook up into the blogroll filter and modify the links on the fly, fetching the latest post from the RSS feed and replacing it into the blogroll.

  1. Create a new folder for the plugin, called live-blogroll. We will have more than one file in our final...