Wordpress Create Plugin Tutorial

[Patrice Mieczkowski]

Next, you need to create a new file in your text editor and save it inside your plugin folder as wpb-plugin-tutorial.php or my-first-plugin.php. The important thing is the .php extension, but you can name the file whatever you want.

We hope this article helped you learn how to create a WordPress plugin. You may also want to take a look at these must-have WordPress plugins and study their source code for more examples or see our guide on how to code a website.

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Loved this article. Followed it as an exercise to get into developing a WP plugin. Good overview of the basics without getting distracted with details. The code does need some updating. That helped me helped me exercise my troubleshooting skills

WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site for Beginners. WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi. The main goal of this site is to provide high quality WordPress tutorials and other training resources to help people learn WordPress and improve their websites.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem empowers those without coding knowledge to create and customize powerful websites. Additionally, it offers almost limitless opportunities for pro developers and web enthusiasts alike.

Before you begin creating a WordPress plugin, you need to figure out the purpose of your plugin, and a unique name to give your plugin. This is important if you want to release your plugin to the WordPress Plugin directory.

Now you have a PHP script with WordPress File Headers inside of your WordPress plugin directory. Next, login to the WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins to see your newly created plugin:

We start by declaring function extra_post_info($content) which creates the function called extra_post_info. This function pulls in the default WordPress $content variable, which as you might guess is the content of the post we want to add extra info too.

You can use the built-in WordPress options page to gather info from the user, and then save it in our WordPress database in the wp_options table. That way we can pull this info later to change what our plugin does on our site.

When you create a WordPress admin menu you can add an add_action function after the add_menu_page function. This call another function update_extra_post_info to save info to the database from our form.

Creating a function called update_extra_post_info you can use the WordPress register_setting function to store info from our form into the database. The value will be stored next to extra_post_info in the wp_options table.

When you view your plugin page, you can see that when EXTRA INFO is entered into our settings, it ends up in the WordPress database beside extra_post_info. When this info is updated, so is the database entry.

To allow our plugin users to change the info from the dashboard, and then have that info reflected across all our posts, we want to use the get_option function to pull in the extra_post_info data we stored.

Lastly, make sure you have a working and up-to-date WordPress installation. There are several ways to update the WordPress core files if you have disabled automatic updates. Back up your WordPress files before updating the site to avoid data loss.

An action is a PHP function called through a specific action hook when a user visits a WordPress web page. Web developers can add their own functions to the list of actions or remove pre-existing ones by adding the wp_head() action hook script before the closing tag () of any page.

Action hooks are contextual, which means that not all WordPress pages call for them. The WordPress Plugin Action Reference page provides a complete list of action hooks and the contexts within which they are called.

The first parameter is the name of the action hook you want to attach the callback to, while the second parameter contains the name of the function that you want to run.

One way of doing this is by using the PHP date() function to get the current day, followed by conditional tags to check if it is Monday. After parsing the information, the page will execute the remove_action() function in every post published on Mondays.

The first parameter is the name of the filter hook you want to add the callback to, while the second parameter contains the name of the function you want to run when the filter is applied.

WordPress has a function that retrieves post excerpts named get_the_excerpt(). It is also a filter hook. Adding this filter after retrieving the excerpt will alter the text before the WordPress site displays it.

The following example plugin defines a filter function that takes the excerpt as its only input parameter, adds some text before it, and returns the new value every time the script calls the get_the_excerpt() function.

The first one should contain the filter hook the function is attached to. The second parameter should be the name of the filter you want to remove. Add a priority parameter if you defined it when creating the function.

Use an FTP client to connect to your hosting account to facilitate the file upload process. Navigate to wp-content -> plugins from the main WordPress directory. Then, create a new folder named my-new-plugin in the plugins folder.

Create a new PHP file called my-first-plugin.php in the folder you made earlier. This main plugin file will contain header comments with additional information for WordPress to read or display.

Attaching the custom function using add_action() allows the plugin to call the action hook under certain circumstances. Adding admin_menu as the first parameter will call the function when a user accesses the admin menu. Meanwhile, mfp_Add_My_Admin_Link is the function that will be run as it is specified as the second parameter.

Finally, navigate to the Plugins section on your WordPress dashboard and activate the new plugin. If the process is successful, the admin panel link of your very first plugin will appear at the bottom of the navigation menu.

With this in mind, follow the best practices for plugin development right from the beginning. Doing so will make the entire process easier for you and any web developers you may work with in the future.

Every WordPress site needs a theme to pull content from the database and display that in a design. Theoretically, you could run a site with just a theme and nothing else. But it would be very limited without plugins.

Exactly what the plugin code will look like will depend on your plugin: some are small, with just one plugin file; while others are massive, with multiple include files, scripts, stylesheets, and template files. And there are plenty that fall somewhere in the middle.

This tells WordPress what your plugin does, where to find out more about it, and who developed it. It also gives information about the version number and the text domain and path for internationalisation, as well as the license.

While there are no hard and fast rules on how you organise the folders in your custom WordPress plugin, it makes sense to adopt the same structure that other plugin developers use. This will familiarise you with the way other plugins are built and mean that if you share your code in future, it will make sense to other people.

You might find you need to use more folders to build a WordPress plugin if your plugin is large or complex. For example, WooCommerce has folders for packages, sample data, and more. These in turn include subfolders for things like blocks and admin files.

If your plugin needs organisation, you can do this by splitting your code into multiple files, called include files. You then put these files into their own folder and call them in your main plugin file using an include or require function.

You then need to enqueue that file in your plugin so that it can be used by WordPress. Add this to your main plugin file, above the functions you already have. I like to add enqueuing and includes first in my plugin file so I can see what other files are being activated.

Another option as you develop your plugin is to create extra PHP files, known as include files. If you have a lot of these, you might create multiple folders for different types of include file, or you might just create one folder called includes.

For example, in our custom post type plugin, we might create some code to vary the way the content of the page is output, using the the_content filter hook to amend the code being run each time the content is output on a product page.

Instead of adding this code to the main plugin file, you could add it to a separate file called movie-content.php and then write the code in that file for the way the content is output for movies.

Sometimes you might find a plugin in the plugin directory or from a plugin vendor that does most of what you need a plugin to do, but not quite all. Or you might be running a plugin and want to make some tweaks and customisations.

For example, WooCommerce has so many functions, hooks, and classes that it has its own API and developer documentation. Each part of the WooCommerce system is powered by one or more of these functions, hooks, or classes. To make changes, you need to identify which code is driving the part of the system you want to change, and then write your own plugin which either attaches to the same hook(s) or extends the classes.

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