WordPress Plugin Development: a Review

WordPress Plug-in Development: Get your copy here.
Wordpress is one of the best content management systems out on the market. Not only it’s a free powerful CMS, WordPress also relies on its community to enhance its functionality by coding themes and plugins. Writing WordPress plugins is not very difficult if you know what you are doing. The only problem is where to get the proper information on how to do it.

A lot of these coders have to spend hours to research the ins and outs of the WordPress platform and read a handful of books to get a handle of the platform. With WordPress Plugin Development, you get it all in one package. The author takes you through the process that you need to go through to develop sophisticated WordPress plugins.

What I like about this book is the fact that it is hands-on. You don’t get a book that just delves into the theory behind writing plugins. The author shows you the way and takes your hand as you code your first set of WordPress plug-ins. Here are the plugins that you will have written by the time you are finished with the book:

• Digg This: add Digg This functionality to your blog.
• Live Blogroll: enhance your blog’s blogroll.
  
• The Wall: create a shout box for WordPress plugin.
• Snazzy Archives: beautifies your archives.
• Insights: access your articles and Flickr images from within the WordPress edit page.
• Post Types: enhance WordPress’ backend as you wish.

As you can guess, the plugins that you code get more complex as you delve deeper into the book. Every single plugin that you write in this book teaches you valuable information that you can use for the next. By the time, you are done with the last plugin, you’ll know exactly how to deal with custom fields, change the backend, and write sophisticated plugins to pretty much do anything you want.

Creating a WordPress plugin is more than just writing the code. You also want to think about security, deployment, and compatibility issues. WordPress Plugin Development teaches you how to:

• Master the WordPress code base, WordPress’s plug-in architecture, and the plug-in application programming interface (API).
• Manipulate data, handle user roles and permissions, and posts.
• Use actions and filters to write more sophisticated code.
• Customize menus, sub-menus, and the plug-in admin panel.
• Use AJAX and jQuery to write more dynamic plug-ins.
• Integrate your plug-in with WordPress panels and the tinyMCE editor
• Work with third-party APIs such as Flicker or Digg API
• Localize your WordPress installation.
• Publish your plugin to WordPress Plugin Repository
• Create safe WordPress plugins to protect the users against hackers.

Overall, WordPress Plugin Development another smash hit by Packt Publishing. This is a great book for anyone who’s interested in writing professional plugins for the WordPress platform. The book is very different from those books that teach you how to write “hello world” code but don’t show you how to code properly. The author walks you through the process of writing a few simple and complex WordPress plugins, and he shows you what you need to look out for to write better, more secure code. If you are planning to get into the WordPress Development business, you must read WordPress Plugin Development.