Mini-review & Competition of WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide

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Vladimir Prelovac is the author of many popular WordPress plugins and articles about WordPress optimization, security and maintenance. He actively uses WordPress platform as a base for Internet development strategy for small & mid-sized businesses. This book is for programmers working with WordPress, who want to develop custom plug-ins and to hack the code base. You need to be familiar with the basics of WordPress and PHP programming and believe that code is poetry; this book will handle the rest.

Overview

In Detail

If you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of WordPress plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Widgets, plug-ins that alter your post output, present custom "views" of your blog, and more.

WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner’s Guide) focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plug-ins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches, in a series of carefully picked, easy-to-follow tutorials. You will discover how to use the WordPress API in all typical situations, from displaying output on the site in the beginning to turning WordPress into a CMS in the last chapter. In Chapters 2 to 7 you will develop six concrete plug-ins and conquer all aspects of WordPress development.

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.

In this book you will learn

Get to know the WordPress code base, WordPress's plug-in architecture, and the plug-in application programming interface (API) and learn how to hack it
Master the WordPress database and the API – access and manipulate data, handle user roles and permissions, posts, and so on
Hook into the rest of WordPress using actions and filters
Change the way your WordPress backend looks by customizing menus, submenus, and the plug-in admin panel
Integrate AJAX and jQuery into your plug-ins to dynamically generate content
Hook directly to WordPress edit pages and use AJAX to generate fast searches
Integrate your plug-in with WordPress panels and the tinyMCE editor
Access and work with third-party APIs like Flickr
Implement localization support for users of other languages
Maintain and manage your plug-in using SVN and publish it to the WordPress Plugin Repository
Handle security issues and make your plug-ins safer to use

We cover the development of six plug-ins from start to finish:

Digg-this: Adds a Digg This button to each post.
Live Blogroll: Adds a recent posts popup for each blog in your blogroll.
The Wall widget: Displays comments on the sidebar without reloading the page.
Snazzy Archives: Presents your site archives in a unique visual way.
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.

Summary of Content

Chapter 1: Preparing for WordPress Development
Chapter 2: Social Bookmarking
Chapter 3: Live Blogroll
Chapter 4: The Wall
Chapter 5: Snazzy Archives
Chapter 6: Insights for WordPress
Chapter 7: Post Types
Chapter 8: Development Goodies

Who is this book for?

This book is for programmers working with WordPress, who want to develop custom plug-ins and to hack the code base. You need to be familiar with the basics of WordPress and PHP programming and believe that code is poetry; this book will handle the rest.

Competition

We've got a brand new mini-review and competition of WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide. Our friends from Packt Publishing are giving away 5 books!

All you need to do, to enter the competition is, read the sample PDF and finish the following sentence:

"Now it's time to expand our plugin with concrete functionality and..."

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Wednesday the 3rd of February 2010. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.

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