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

WordPress and GPL


WordPress is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL), which has several implications to your plugins.

The most important one is that plugin code using WordPress functions automatically becomes GPL as well. This still means you can sell your plugins. But it also means that anyone who buys it or downloads it from the Internet is free to modify it and even resell it without asking for your permission.

A commercially oriented approach to plugin development is still possible, as most clients will be interested in a long-term relationship, with support and plugin updates included.

Technically speaking, there might be a way to license your code differently if you created it in the following way:

  1. Write most of your code as a library, without any WordPress calls.

  2. Create a WordPress plugin that will call the functions from your library.

This way, only the WordPress plugin becomes GPL, and you can license the library separately.

The GPL license is still subject to many different...