Book Image

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Book Image

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Overview of this book

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building blogs and general websites. By learning how to develop and integrate your own plugins, you can add functionality and extend WordPress in any way imaginable. By tapping into the additional power and functionality that plugins provide, you can make your site easier to administer, add new features, or even alter the very nature of how WordPress works. Covering WordPress version 3, this book makes it super easy for you to build a variety of plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is a practical hands-on tutorial for learning how to create your own plugins for WordPress. Using best coding practices, this book will walk you through the design and creation of a variety of original plugins.WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plugins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches in a series of easy-to-follow and informative steps. You will discover how to deconstruct an existing plugin, use the WordPress API in typical scenarios, hook into the database, version your code with SVN, and deploy your new plugin to the world.Each new chapter introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is packed with information, tips, and examples that will help you gain comfort and confidence in your ability to harness and extend the power of WordPress via plugins.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The overall plan


In order to demonstrate how to integrate Ajax into your WordPress plugins, we've chosen a textbook example: automatically showing search results. Later in this book, we'll use Ajax to do more complicated things, but first we're going to cover the basics by breathing life into the standard search widget.

If you don't have the search widget enabled on your site, enable it now so you can see what we're talking about. In the WordPress manager, click on the Appearance | Widgets link and then drag the Search widget into the Primary Widget Area so that it becomes active. On a tangential note, WordPress uses Ajax to save your widget selections without you having to click anything.

Take a look at your home page to verify that you see the search widget. Try searching for a few terms to get a feel for how this process works.

Pretty basic, eh? You've seen this type of thing before, but let's take a moment to talk about what is really going on here. On a technical level, here is what...