WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook

Over 80 step-by-step recipes to extend the most popular CMS and share your creations with its community

Overview

• Learn to create plugins and configuration panels in order to bring new capabilities to WordPress
• Tailor WordPress to your needs with new content types, custom widgets, and fancy jQuery elements, without breaching security needs
• Detailed instructions on how to achieve each task, followed by clear explanations of concepts featured in each recipe

In Detail

WordPress is a popular, powerful, and open Content Management System. Learning to extend its core capabilities allows you to unleash its full potential, whether you’re an administrator who cannot find the right extension, or a developer with a great idea to enhance the platform for the community, or a website designer/developer working to fulfill a client’s needs.

“WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook” is the perfect companion for plugin developers, offering easy-to-follow instructions to accomplish tasks that range from basic plugin creation and configuration to advanced customization techniques. Each topic is illustrated through realistic examples showing how it can be applied to solve common problems, followed by explanations of all concepts used.

Create WordPress plugins of varying complexity, from a few lines that change a specific function to complex extensions that provide intricate new capabilities.

From the creation of your first simple plugin to adding entire new sections and widgets in the administration interface, learn how to change and extend WordPress to perform virtually any task. After installing and configuring an efficient plugin development environment, you will discover how to register your own callbacks that WordPress will execute at key points, forming the basis of plugin creation. Armed with this essential knowledge, you’ll explore how to create administration pages to allow users to configure your new creations and to add new content management sections to WordPress through custom post types and custom database tables. Once you have all these elements in place, improve your plugins by customizing the post and page editors, creating user-facing forms to populate new content sections, making your plugin output dynamic using Javascript and AJAX as well as adding new widgets to the platform. Finally, see how to add support for multiple languages and distribute your work to the global WordPress community.

“WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook” provides you with tools to create any plugin you can imagine.

What you will learn from this book

• Prepare an efficient development environment
• Create your first plugins using WordPress action and filter hooks
• Add new sections to the administration interface for plugin configuration
• Create new content types using Custom Post Types or Custom Database Tables
• Make your content dynamic with JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX
• Add new widgets to the WordPress library
• Prepare your plugin to be translated for broad international use
• Get your new creations ready to be shared on the official WordPress site

Approach

This is a cookbook with step-by-step instructions and code examples required to learn WordPress plugin development easily.

Who this book is written for

If you are a WordPress user, developer, or a site integrator with basic knowledge of PHP and an interest to create new plugins to address your personal needs, client needs, or share with the community, then this book is for you.