Book description
Learn to create plugins for WordPress 4.x to deliver custom projects or share with the community through detailed step-by-step recipes and code examples
About This Book
- Learn how to change and extend WordPress to perform virtually any task
- Explore the plugin API through approachable examples and detailed explanations
- Mold WordPress to your project’s needs or transform it to benefit the entire community
Who This Book Is 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.
What You Will Learn
- Discover how to register user callbacks with WordPress, forming the basis of plugin creation
- Explore the creation of administration pages and adding new content management sections through custom post types and custom database tables
- Improve your plugins by customizing the post and page editors, categories and user profiles, and creating visitor-facing forms
- Make your pages dynamic using Javascript, AJAX and adding new widgets to the platform
- Learn how to add support for plugin translation and distribute your work to the WordPress community
In Detail
WordPress is a popular, powerful, and open Content Management System. Learning how to extend its capabilities allows you to unleash its full potential, whether you're an administrator trying to find the right extension, a developer with a great idea to enhance the platform for the community, or a website developer working to fulfill a client's needs. This book shows readers how to navigate WordPress' vast set of API functions to create high-quality plugins with easy-to-configure administration interfaces.
With new recipes and materials updated for the latest versions of WordPress 4.x, this second edition teaches you how to create plugins of varying complexity ranging from a few lines of code to complex extensions that provide intricate new capabilities.
You'll start by using the basic mechanisms provided in WordPress to create plugins and execute custom user code. You will then see how to design administration panels, enhance the post editor with custom fields, store custom data, and modify site behavior based on the value of custom fields. You'll safely incorporate dynamic elements on web pages using scripting languages, and build new widgets that users will be able to add to WordPress sidebars and widget areas.
By the end of this book, you will be able to create WordPress plugins to perform any task you can imagine.
Style and approach
This cookbook will take you through the creation of your first simple plugin to adding entirely new sections and widgets in the administration interface, so you can learn how to change and extend WordPress to perform virtually any task. Each topic is illustrated through realistic examples showing how to solve common problems, followed by detailed explanations of all concepts used
Table of contents
- Preface
-
Preparing a Local Development Environment
- Introduction
- Installing a web server on your computer
- Downloading and configuring a local WordPress installation
- Creating a local Subversion repository
- Importing initial files to a local Subversion repository
- Checking out files from a Subversion repository
- Committing changes to a Subversion repository
- Installing a dedicated code editor/text editor
-
Plugin Framework Basics
- Introduction
- Creating a plugin file and header
- Adding output content to page headers using plugin actions
- Using WordPress path utility functions to load external files and images
- Modifying the site generator meta tag using plugin filters
- Adding text after each item's content using plugin filters
- Inserting link statistics tracking code in page body using plugin filters
- Troubleshooting coding errors and printing variable content
- Creating a new simple shortcode
- Creating a new shortcode with parameters
- Creating a new enclosing shortcode
- Loading a style sheet to format plugin output
- Writing plugins using object-oriented PHP
-
User Settings and Administration Pages
- Introduction
- Creating default user settings on plugin initialization
- Storing user settings using arrays
- Removing plugin data on deletion
- Creating an administration page menu item in the settings menu
- Creating a multi-level administration menu
- Adding menu items leading to external pages
- Hiding items which users should not access from the default menu
- Rendering the admin page contents using HTML
- Processing and storing plugin configuration data
- Displaying a confirmation message when options are saved
- Adding custom help pages
- Rendering the admin page contents using the Settings API
- Accessing user settings from action and filter hooks
- Formatting admin pages using meta boxes
- Splitting admin code from the main plugin file to optimize site performance
- Storing style sheet data in user settings
- Managing multiple sets of user settings from a single admin page
- Creating network-level admin pages
-
The Power of Custom Post Types
- Introduction
- Creating a custom post type
- Adding a new section to the custom post type editor
- Displaying single custom post type items using a custom layout
- Displaying custom post type data in shortcodes
- Adding custom categories for custom post types
- Adding custom fields to categories
- Hiding the category editor from the custom post type editor
- Displaying additional columns in the custom post list page
- Adding filters for custom categories to the custom post list page
- Adding Quick Edit fields for custom categories
- Updating page title to include custom post data using plugin filters
- Customizing Post and Page Editors
- Accepting User Content Submissions
- Customizing User Data
-
Creating Custom MySQL Database Tables
- Introduction
- Creating new database tables
- Deleting custom tables on plugin removal
- Updating custom table structure on plugin upgrade
- Displaying custom table data on an admin page
- Inserting and updating records in custom tables
- Deleting records from custom tables
- Displaying custom database table data in shortcodes
- Implementing a search function to retrieve custom table data
- Importing data from a user file into custom tables
-
Leveraging JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX Scripts
- Introduction
- Safely loading jQuery onto WordPress web pages
- Displaying a pop-up dialog using the built-in ThickBox plugin
- Controlling pop-up dialog display using shortcodes
- Displaying a calendar day selector using the Datepicker plugin
- Adding tooltips to admin page form fields using the TipTip plugin
- Using AJAX to dynamically update partial page contents
- Adding New Widgets to the WordPress Library
- Enabling Plugin Internationalization
- Distributing Your Plugin on wordpress.org
Product information
- Title: WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook - Second Edition
- Author(s):
- Release date: July 2017
- Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
- ISBN: 9781788291187
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