LostInTechnology

Book Review: WordPress Plugin Development, Beginners Guide

Posted on 13. Apr, 2010 by srikanth in Miscellaneous

WordPress is one of  the popular content managements systems(CMS) for blogs. Plugins on WordPress are powerful and enhance the blog’s functionality. We wanted to share an interesting book, a new release from PACKT publishers which enables to build powerful, interactive plug-ins for your blog.

This book has everything you need to create and distribute your own plug-ins following WordPress coding standards.  Step-by-step instructions with an emphasis on experimentation and tweaking code are made available to make sure its stands as a good guide for beginner’s to build powerful and interactive plugins for WordPress.

WordPress plugin development, beginners guide contains comprehensive walk through the development of six feature-rich, real-world plug-ins that are being used by many WordPress users.

From making plugins for easier web site administration, to adding a new feature – plug-ins enable you to customize and extend a blog or web site’s functionality. WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner’s Guide) focuses on teaching key aspects of modern WordPress development with easy to follow tutorials.

Each new chapter and each new plug-in introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. This book is written as a guide to take your WordPress skills from the very beginning to the level where you are able to completely understand how WordPress works and how you can use it to your advantage.

Book Details

• Paperback: 296 pages [191mm x 235mm]
• Table of Contents
• ISBN 1847193595
• ISBN 13 978-1-847193-59-9
• Author: Vladimir Prelovac
• Topics and Technologies Content Management, Open Source, AJAX, Web Development, WordPress, Beginner Guides

A Brief Walk Through

The book starts by teaching the advantages of WordPress development, and what WordPress has to offer for plugin authors. You will learn and understand how to extract information using the WordPress API and how to use CSS to improve the look and feel of a plugin. The book explores more cool things like the creation of a very sleek looking WordPress enhancement, an archives plugin to present your website archives in a unique visual way.

Further chapters show how to modify the backend admin panel of WordPress to suit your needs, like the Manage Posts panel to display the information you need. Additional steps involved in localizing, publishing and documenting the plugin are also included. It also covers useful tips and ideas to improve your general WordPress knowledge further.

What You Will Learn

• WordPress’s plug-in architecture, plugin (API), and get to know how to hack it.
• Customizing the WordPress backend – by altering menus, sub-menus, and the plug-in administration panel.
• Clear understanding of handling user roles and permissions, posts, pages etc., on WordPress.
• Integrate AJAX and jQuery into your plug-ins to dynamically generate content.
• Integrate your plug-in with WordPress panels and the tinyMCE editor.
• Maintain and manage your plug-in using SVN and publish it to the WordPress Plugin Repository.
• Handling security issues and making your plug-ins safer to use.

This book explains the development of six plug-ins from start to finish.

• Digg-this: Adds a ‘Digg This’ button to each blog post.
• Live Blogroll: Adds a recent posts pop-up for each blog in your blogroll.
• The Wall widget: Displays comments on the sidebar without re-loading the page.
• Snazzy Archives: Displays your site archives with a unique visual style.
• Insights: Access your articles and Flickr images from within the WordPress edit page.
• Post Types: Provides pre-defined post templates to quickly add a photo or a link to your blog.

Who This Book is Written For

If you are a programmer working with WordPress, would like to develop custom plug-ins and learn to hack the WordPress code base, this book is for you. You need to be familiar with the basics of WordPress and PHP programming.

Conclusion

From backend customization to building snazzy archives, an ajax powered wall for the blog sidebar to insights for WordPress and development goodies, this book is power packed for WordPress plugin development and will serve as a good guide for beginners to build interactive, design-rich and powerful plugins for weblogs.

by Srikanth AD from Techonaut. Contact him by email at adsrikanth[at]gmail[dot]com

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Tags: beginner's guide, book review, plugin development, wordpress