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

Programming the Manage panel


The Manage Posts screen can be changed to show extra columns, or remove unwanted columns in the listing.

Let's say that we want to show the post type—Normal, Photo or Link. Remember the custom field post-type that we added to our posts? We can use it now to differentiate post types.

Time for action — Add post type column in the Manage panel

We want to add a new column to the Manage panel, and we will call it Type. The value of the column will represent the post type—Normal, Photo or Link.

  1. Expand the admin_menu() function to load the function to handle Manage Page hooks:

    add_submenu_page('post-new.php', __('Add URL', $this->plugin_domain) , __('URL', $this->plugin_domain) , 1 , 'add-url', array(&$this, 'display_form') );
    // handle Manage page hooks
    add_action('load-edit.php', array(&$this, 'handle_load_edit') );
    }
    
  2. Add the hooks to the columns on the Manage screen:

    // Manage page hooks
    function handle_load_edit() {
    // handle Manage screen functions...