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

Customizing our plugin


Now that we have the basic functionality in place, you might realize that the success of this plugin depends on the uniqueness of your shortcode. If another plugin happened to use the same name for their shortcode, your plugin could break. It's not a likely scenario, but it's one we're going to address by creating an administration page to let the users control the name of the shortcode.

We've created a manager page before, but let's review the process now. In order to have a manager page for this plugin, we need three things: a function that defines the menu item, a function that generates the page when that menu item is clicked, and finally an add_action() hook to ensure that the other two functions are executed.

Let's begin by creating the function that will add the menu item. We are going to do something new here by demonstrating how you can create a dedicated menu item. It's not at all necessary for this plugin, but we wanted to show you how to do it. Add the following...