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

WordPress limitations


Unfortunately, WordPress does not yet have a good way for you to reference common files between plugins. In the case of these tests, it would be more efficient to put them into some sort of global WordPress library so that multiple plugins could use the tests contained in a single testing class file. However, until our testing scripts get integrated into the WordPress core, you have to work with a couple of options.

The first option is that you can copy all your testing functions into a dedicated class used by only your plugin (as we did in the previous examples). The upside here is that this is guaranteed to work, but the downside is that it's inefficient—imagine if 100 plugins each copied the exact same tests. It would take up 100 times more space, and it would be a nightmare to maintain—even the most trifling change in one of the tests would require that you make the same alterations to the other 99 copies.

As part of a second option, you can put all of these tests...