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

Adding a post template


Our next goal is to add a simple post template to the WordPress write page.

The purpose of a custom post template is to handle writing a quick post in case we don't need the whole Write Post interface, for reasons of speed or customization.

The great thing about post templates is that they can be customized to accept any information you want—for example, job portal listings or inventory items.

Let's start with a simple Add Photo template where we want to be able to just set the title, specify a photo and publish immediately.

Time for action — Create 'add photo' post template

  1. In order to create the post template, we need a place for it in the menus. We will use the Write menu and place a submenu there:

    // add admin_menu action
    post template, addingadd photo post template, creatingadd_action('admin_menu', array(&$this, 'admin_menu'));
    }
    // Hook the admin menu
    function admin_menu() {
    // submenu pages
    add_submenu_page('post-new.php', __('Add Photo', $this->plugin_domain...