Building WordPress Plugin

Welcome to the final part of our series on building a WordPress plugin! Starting as a complete beginner, we’ve come a long way over the series and picked up the beginnings of what could be some truly useful skills – as well as a new-found appreciation of the hard work that goes into actually putting a plugin together. To wrap things up, we’ll highlight some important plugin topics that we didn’t quite get to, and suggest a whole slew of useful resources for taking things further on your own. We’ll also provide a handy list of classic WordPress plugins that are well […]

Welcome to part five of our series on developing a plugin from scratch. Progress has been nice and steady to date, and by this stage we’ve successfully created a significant portion of our theoretical functionality. In the last installment, we finally got to see the fruits of our labor on-screen in the form of a functioning shortcode. This time around, we’re dipping in and out of both the front and back end. We previously left ourselves a little work to do in terms of organizing the display, and we’ve also yet to look at the settings page that was mentioned […]

Welcome to the fourth part of our plugin building series! So far on our journey, we’ve set ourselves up with structure in mind by using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, and created a separate place for our content to live in the back end by registering our own custom post type. This time around, we’ll be giving our plugin users options for actually displaying quotes that are entered into the system. We’ll kick things off by building in some functionality to handle the random selection of quotes, and then move on to looking at creating our own shortcode options. By the […]

In the second part of our series, we got ourselves off to a structured start by using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate to erect some sensible scaffolding around our future code. By taking this approach, we were able to kick things off with a substantial amount of best plugin practices baked in for free. This time around, we’ll look at giving some of our future user-created content a home of its own in the back end by using a custom post type. This will give us an opportunity to take some baby steps in actually using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate itself, and […]

In the first part of our series on building a plugin, we kicked things off with some general background information on plugins, then cobbled together a very basic Hello World example to prove that creating a functioning plugin of some sort is within everyone’s grasp. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that our initial approach to making a plugin was a little on the slapdash side. We simply wanted to see something on the screen, and weren’t too concerned about what was happening behind the scenes. This time around we’ll get a bit more organized, employing a handy piece of kit called […]

Plugins have played such a crucial role in driving WordPress’ continuous success over the years that it’s impossible to imagine the platform without them. However, while we’ve all probably popped the hood of a theme in order to make a few stylistic tweaks at some stage, the inner workings of plugins are still a mystery for many WordPress users. There remains a slight sense of uncertainty and unease among non-technical users about what exactly is going on behind the scenes. That’s a situation we’re setting out to shed some light on in our six-part guide to building a WordPress plugin from […]