E-book details

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials. Create your own powerful, interactive plugins to extend and add features to your WordPress site

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials. Create your own powerful, interactive plugins to extend and add features to your WordPress site

Everett Griffiths, Brian Bondari, Matt Mullenweg

Ebook
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.
  • WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials
    • Table of Contents
    • WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials
    • Credits
    • About the Authors
    • About the Reviewers
    • www.PacktPub.com
      • Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more
        • Why Subscribe?
        • Free Access for Packt account holders
    • Preface
      • What this book covers
      • What you need for this book
      • Who this book is for
      • Conventions
      • Reader feedback
      • Customer support
        • Downloading the example code for this book
        • Errata
        • Piracy
        • Questions
    • 1. Preparing for WordPress Development
      • WordPress background
      • Extending WordPress
      • Understanding WordPress architecture
        • Templating
        • Introducing plugins
      • Summarizing architecture
      • Tools for web development
        • WordPress
        • Mac
        • Windows
        • Text editor
        • Using an IDE
        • FTP client
        • MySQL client
      • Coding best practices
      • Basic organization
        • Isolate tasks into functions
        • Use classes
        • Use descriptive variable names
        • Use descriptive function names
        • Separate logic and display layers
        • Go modular, to a point
        • Avoid short tags
      • Planning ahead / starting development
        • Interfaces
        • Localization
        • Documentation for the developer
        • Version control
        • Environment
        • Tests
        • Security
          • Printing user-supplied data to a page
          • Using user-supplied data to construct database queries
      • Debugging
        • Clearing your browser cache
        • Updating your php.ini file
        • Configuring your wp-config.php file
        • Checking your syntax
        • Checking values
        • Exercise
      • Summary
    • 2. Anatomy of a Plugin
      • Deconstructing an existing plugin: "Hello Dolly"
        • Activating the plugin
        • Examining the hello.php file
      • Information header
        • Exercisebreaking the header
        • Location, name, and format
      • Understanding the Includes
        • Exercise parse errors
      • Bonus for the curious
      • User-defined functions
        • Exercisean evil functionless plugin
        • What just happened
        • Omitting the closing "?>" PHP tag
        • A better example: Adding functions
      • Referencing hooks via add_action() and add_filter()
      • Actions versus Filters
        • Exerciseactions and filters
        • Exercisefilters
        • Reading more
      • Summary
    • 3. Social Bookmarking
      • The overall plan
      • Proof of concept
        • Avoiding conflicting function names
      • The master plugin outline
        • The plugin information header
          • In your browserinformation header
        • Adding a link to the post content
          • Documenting our functions
          • In your browserlinking to the post content
        • Adding JavaScript to the head
          • Making our link dynamic
            • In your browserdynamic links
        • Adding a button template
        • Getting the post URL
          • In your browsergetting the post URL
        • Getting the post title
        • Getting the description
        • Getting the media type
        • Getting the post topic
          • In your browsertitle, description, and topic
      • Checking WordPress versions
      • Summary
    • 4. Ajax Search
      • What is Ajax?
      • The overall plan
      • The proof of concept mock up
        • Hooking up jQuery
          • Test that jQuery has loaded
          • What happened?
          • Using the FireBug console directly
        • Writing HTML dynamically to a target div
          • Multi-line strings
          • Viewing the generated page
          • Anonymous functions
          • Adding a div on the fly
        • Create a listener
        • Fetching data from another page
      • Creating our plugin
        • Creating index.php and activating the plugin
        • Creating our first PHP class
        • Updating index.php
        • Testing your version of PHP
        • Testing for searchable pages
        • Adding your own CSS files
        • Adding your search handler
        • Adding your own JavaScript
        • Handling Ajax search requests
        • Formatting your search results
      • Summary
    • 5. Content Rotator
      • The plan
      • Widget overview
      • Preparation
        • Activating your plugin
        • Activating the widget
          • Having problems?
        • Parents and children: extending classes
        • Objects vs. libraries: when to use static functions
      • Add custom text
      • Adding widget options
      • Generating random content
      • Expiration dates: adding options to our widget
        • Expiration dates: enforcing the shelf life
        • Explaining the $instance
      • Adding a custom manager page
        • Adding options to the custom manager page
      • Randomizing content from the database
      • Review of PHP functions used
      • Summary
    • 6. Standardized Custom Content
      • What WordPress does for you: custom fields
      • What WordPress doesnt do for you
      • Standardizing a post's custom fields
      • Creating a new plugin
        • Removing the default WordPress form for custom fields
        • Creating our own custom meta box
        • Defining custom fields
        • Generating custom form elements
        • Saving custom content
      • Having trouble saving data?
      • Displaying custom data in your Templates
        • Copying a theme
        • Modifying the theme
        • Granular display of custom fields
        • Bonus for the MySQL curious
      • Known limitations
      • Summary
    • 7. Custom Post Types
      • Background: What's in a name?
      • Understanding register_post_type()
      • Customizing our post type
        • Using shortcodes
        • Testing our shortcode
      • Customizing our plugin
      • Creating a settings shortcut link
      • Cleaning up when uninstalling
      • Summary
    • 8. Versioning Your Code with Subversion (SVN)
      • Why Subversion?
        • Understanding the terminology and concepts
        • Checking out a local working copy
        • SVN folder structure
        • Checkout, revisited
      • Setting up an SVN repository
      • Checking out a local working copy of our repo
      • Adding files
      • Committing changes to the repository
      • Overcoming errors
        • Verifying the new state of your repository
        • Adding more files to your repository
        • Removing files from the repository
        • Updating your working copy
        • Tagging a version
        • Reverting an entire project
        • Reverting a single file
      • Moving files
      • Exporting your working copy
      • Quick reference
      • Summary
    • 9. Preparing Your Plugin for Distribution
      • Public enemy number one: PHP notices
      • PHP short tags
      • Conflicting names
      • Modifying loader.php
      • Testing WordPress version
      • Testing PHP version
      • Testing MySQL version
      • Testing PHP modules
      • Testing WordPress installed plugins
      • Custom tests
      • Unit tests
      • WordPress limitations
      • Health check page
      • Storing test results in the database
      • Death to clippy: Use sensible configurations
      • Double check your interface
      • Documentation
        • Identify the purpose
        • Learning to drive: Keeping it relevant
        • Phrasebooks vs. dictionaries: Give examples
        • Analogy: The three bears
        • Analogy: PC load letter
      • The decalog of documentation
      • Summary
    • 10. Publishing Your Plugin
      • Internationalization and localization
      • Processing each message
        • Choosing a textdomain
      • Best practices
      • Working with formatting
      • More advanced messages
      • Plural vs. singular
      • More complex messages
        • Notes to translators
      • Language files
      • Creating a POT file
      • Creating translations: .po files
      • Loading a textdomain
      • Updating a translation
      • Format for the readme.txt file
        • Section installation
        • Section Frequently Asked Questions
        • Section screenshots
        • New addition videos
        • Section summary
      • Requesting and using SVN access
      • Publicity and promotion
      • Summary
    • A. Recommended Resources
      • PHP reference
      • Function reference
      • The WordPress forums
      • WebDev Studios
      • Viper007Bond
      • Kovshenin
      • SLTaylor
      • XPlus3
      • WP Engineer
      • Other plugins
    • B. WordPress API Reference
      • PHP functions
        • dirname
        • file_get_contents
        • preg_match
        • preg_replace
        • print_r
        • sprintf
        • strtolower
        • substr
      • WordPress Functions
        • __
        • _e
        • add_action
        • add_filter
        • add_meta_box
        • add_options_page
        • check_admin_referer
        • esc_html
        • get_option
        • get_post_meta
        • get_the_ID
        • register_post_type
        • remove_meta_box
        • screen_icon
        • the_content
        • the_meta
        • update_post_meta
        • wp_count_posts
        • wp_die
        • wp_nonce_field
      • Actions
        • admin_init
        • admin_menu
        • do_meta_boxes
        • init
        • save_post
        • widgets_init
        • wp_head
      • Filters
        • the_content
    • Index
  • Title: WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials. Create your own powerful, interactive plugins to extend and add features to your WordPress site
  • Author: Everett Griffiths, Brian Bondari, Matt Mullenweg
  • Original title: WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials. Create your own powerful, interactive plugins to extend and add features to your WordPress site
  • ISBN: 9781849513531, 9781849513531
  • Date of issue: 2011-03-24
  • Format: Ebook
  • Item ID: e_3b8s
  • Publisher: Packt Publishing