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

Prepare archives


Now that we have the page set up, we can begin with modifying our display() function to show all the posts.

The function will get the posts from the database, sorted by date (newest to oldest), and then print them using a predefined layout.

We want to name all our archive elements appropriately in the layout, so we can use CSS and jQuery later.

Every column will represent one whole month of post archives. Each month will have different days when postings occurred, and each day may have several posts for that day. Each post will have a title, image (if available) and excerpt text.

Below is a diagram of the archive structure with CSS div elements used.

The structure we have in mind looks something like this:

Time for action — Show archives of posts

Let's modify our display() function to retrieve all the posts from the database.

  1. Modify the existing display() function to print the general elements of the page:

    function display()
    {
    global $wpdb;
    // these variables store the current...