WordPress CMS has
changed the way in the field of web development providing new,
innovative and prosperous ideas to developers. Today WordPress
development is used in several ways benefitting all sort of
businesses.
WordPress is among
the best platforms to create your own plugin and enhancing the
functionality by placing it in your blog. Plugins can be placed
anywhere in your blog. This extensibility provides a better growth to
your blog in terms of visits and authority.
WordPress delivers
special features for developing unique plugins. As a developer, you
can get hold on your blog by developing specific plugins of your
requirement. Hiring a professional PHP developer to develop
WordPress plugin for your blog may cost you a lot more than you have
imagined.
You can build your
own plugins and sidebar widgets and get more tuned into deeper areas
of WordPress CMS development. It's not just limited to WordPress, but
you can also have more knowledge about other content management
systems too.
An Introduction of WordPress Folder Structure
As shown in the
picture, you can see the list of basic app directories. You'll find a
wp-content folder, and within the folder, there is plugins directory.
This plugins directory is the home for all the plugins.
If you want to
create a small plugin with a single .php file, then it can be
directly saved within the plugins directory, however if your file is
bit complicated or consists of multiple .php files, then it's better
to create a sub-directory named after your plugin.
You can also
create a readme.txt file, as it's important if you are providing your
file for downloading. As an author, you can also provide details
about several sections of your file.
Let's Begin with Your First PHP File for WordPress Plugin Development
First of all you
need to create a simple .php file for a new plugin. You can name
anything to .php file, but it's a good practice to name it after your
plugin's official name. The first few lines of your code should be
information about that plugin and they must be placed in comments for
the parsing engine. You can place your information as shown in
picture below.
You can see the
plugin's name within the admin backend panel at the time of
activation. It's very similar to the URI placed within the details
panel inside the plugins panel.
Best Practices for WordPress Naming Conventions
It's the best
practice to create an entire plugin class system to avoid the
conflicts between the names of variables and functions, but if you
are not familiar with the OOP concepts, then you can write all your
code within one sample file.
Now we need few
variables to define, which are the key elements to be implemented
inside our templates files. Check the example of our file provided
below taken from our plugin file with all the core logic code
removed.
It's a better
practice to follow all the rules and regulations set by WordPress to
avoid collisions. As there are many internal functions within the
WordPress file, there are chances of having duplicate functions. Try
to make a habit of prefixing a label to all the names of your
variables and functions.
Role of Filters & Actions
Filters and
Actions play a very important role in developing a WordPress plugin.
These two concepts have an in-depth relation in manipulating the
plugin data.
Actions and
Filters are two standard codes that comes along with WordPress API.
The developers can also modify the codes within the Filters and
Actions to use it for their new plugin.
Acknowledging "Add_filter()"
A filter is a
piece of data that is passed into WordPress, that allows a developer
to easily filter content within your own written code to modify your
data as per your needs. For example, you can use the filter to change
the content which is availabe in WordPress as a variable set.
Filters provide an
easy way to write plugins to customize the look and feel of your
website. Filters are generally used for developing sidebar widgets
and small functions to modify the looks of you blog post.
Acknowledging "Add_action()"
Actions are much
similar to Filters, but instead of using bits of data, they target
the pre-defined areas within the template and admin panel. Actions
can be applied whenever you edit or change the content of a page.
There are some predefined areas where you can target Actions, some of
them are listed below.
- save_post – called when a post/page is created from start or updated
- trackback_post – called whenever a new trackback is added into a post
- loop_end – called immediately after the final post has been processed through the WordPress loop
- wp_head – called when the template is loaded and runs the wp_head() function
- publish_post – called when a post is published or when status is changed into “published”
Once you'll
understand the difference between Actions and Filters, then you'll be
able to create a comprehensive plugin for your blog.
Inputting Our Final Plugin Logic
Now we'll put our
plugin code in the plugin file. The documentation provided to
understand API comes in very handy and provides an excellent resource
to developers. You may face some difficulties, if you're not
comfortable with PHP language.
Add the function
as shown in the picture below within your plugin's header comment,
and this code can also be placed within your theme's function. The
code provided is for a dynamic content based on limited range of
characters.
Finally Install & Run the Plugin
Once you have
completed with the code, you need access to the WordPress
administration panel and browse the current plugin file for
installation.
Conclusion
It's very
important to know the basics to get started with WordPress
development. The WordPress plugin development provides a great deal
of functionality. You can try practicing these methods on your local
installation of WordPress.
Want to develop your own WordPress application or plugin?
About Anna Harris:
Anna Harris working as web content writer and a strategist for a major IT firm specialized in various mobile application development services for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other operating systems.
Follow Anna Harris On
Anna Harris working as web content writer and a strategist for a major IT firm specialized in various mobile application development services for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other operating systems.
Follow Anna Harris On
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