Developing a WordPress Plugin : The Most Easy Guide

Developing a WordPress Plugin is very easy. It does not need any special knowledge. Follow our guide and by using simple HTML,CSS, PHP you can develop a plugin. This guide on Developing a WordPress Plugin should have been published before our guide for Publishing WordPress Plugin, but still late is better than never.

 

Why We Will Opt for Developing a WordPress Plugin of Our Own ?

 

First is, those who have many websites or run a service for WordPress, needs custom WordPress Plugins. Second, many WordPress Plugin has the side effect of giving backlinks, like Sitemap Plugins. Other than that, Developing a WordPress Plugin means, you are doing a good work for the Open Source and also it can promote your website.

 

Steps for Developing a WordPress Plugin : Always Learn From Reverse Engineering

 

Reverse Engineering is always good way to develop even an unrelated plugin, it helps peoples like me, who has no traditional education of PHP. It is the study of how a working plugin actually working, we are not saying to do reverse engineering for Developing a WordPress Plugin just to copy or clone a plugin. That is very pathetic.

 

Developing a WordPress Plugin : Plan Your ideas and Proceed

 

First write your ideas in a text editor like notepad or something, it will make yourself clear what you basically want to do. This helps for logical working. The easiest WordPress Plugin can be just one php file. But the traditional example of Hello Dolly is not ideal to give example to a newbie for Developing a WordPress Plugin. The reason is, it has integrated calls to WordPress ADmin panel CSS file. Posts in Sidebar is a good example. You ca download it from here :

 

 

Unzip it on your desktop. You must have some good text Editor like Gedit. It basically has two important php files :

 

 

Understand the logic for Developing a WordPress Plugin in our way more fast :

 

• Posts in Sidebar creates a new widget whch can display a list of post from a given author and/or category and/or tag.
• Your need is almost the same, but instead of  list of post, you want to develop a plugin that shows a list of RSS feed.
• You already know the PHP function to do the work of fetching RSS feed.
• This  Posts in Sidebar plugin will act as a building block.

 

If you open the posts-in-sidebar.php , it will look like this :

 

 

Often we use comments to help in future development. You can understand, the function is actually defined on this file to make it working. Your work is –

 

• Change the folder’s name first
• Change the name of the main php file
• The changing of name will be of your plugin which you will develop.
• Removing the functions not needed.
• Adding functions you want.
• Test on your test WordPress installation.

 

The mantra for Developing a WordPress Plugin is studying easy plugins and Developing a WordPress Plugin that will be unique. If you only change the name of this  Posts in Sidebar  plugin and claim as yours, it will be very pathetic slap to Open Source, that is stealing !