I’m beginning a new tutorial series on WordPress Plugin Development 101. It will start at the very beginning and look at the fundamentals of plugin development in WordPress. This is a quick video post Video (embed is broken) http://www.screenr.com/sVA7 The series will cover the following topics: What makes a plugin What can/should be a plugin…
Have you ever pushed out an update that included modifications to scripts or styles and then later had to tell someone to clear their cache or do a hard refresh in order to see the updates? There is actually a very simple way to avoid this scenario and force the browser to display the updated…
Conditional tags are functions used in WordPress themes and plugins to display content, or perform actions, based upon whether a certain condition is true or not. A condition can be anything; it might be a condition for whether the user is currently viewing the homepage, or a condition for whether the user is currently logged-in.…
When beginning writing plugins for WordPress, most developers will publish the fruits of their work in the official WordPress.org Plugin repository. It’s a great way to get into plugin development for your favorite CMS. I started this myself in June 2011 and so far it has gotten me lots of experience on how to code…
This tutorial demonstrates how to display a list of recent custom post type entries in any widgetized sidebar in less than 5 minutes. The widget is provided by my plugin called Better Recent Posts Widget Pro, and it is exceptionally powerful, yet very easy to use. The widget will allow us to list entries from…
In part four of Writing Your First WordPress Plugin, I demonstrate how to load style sheets with your plugin. I also walk you through some best practices in terms of efficiency in regards to when you should, and should not, load styles/scripts with your plugin. This entry is part 4 of 7 in the Writing…
WordPress themes are based entirely on templates. These templates provide a way to customize the layout of your content on different pages and give you total control over how your website functions. Easy Content Types includes a very powerful function that will automatically create new template files for your custom post types and taxonomies based…
In part 3 of this tutorial series, I describe a couple of fundamental techniques for beginner WordPress plugin developers. This section details a very important function for WordPress plugins: how to add any kind of content to the end of a post. I show how it is done, and then also demonstrate some real world…
Knowing how to best structure your plugin is very, very important to the success and quality of your plugin. You should spend several minutes laying out the structure of your plugin before you ever begin writing it. This part of the Writing Your First WordPress Plugin series will walk you through the process of laying…
Displaying meta information that you have created using custom meta boxes in Easy Content Types is really simple, as long as you are using version 2.3 or newer. There are a series of options in the Settings page that allows you to define how the meta field values should be displayed.
The world of plugins can seem a scary place to venture if you’ve never been there before. I remember when I first started, it was because I wrote a tutorial over at Pro Blog Design about how to create a custom Font Uploader for your WordPress theme, and readers asked that I make it into…
Ever wanted a function to display your Flickr photos anywhere you want? This quick plugin will give you exactly that: a simple function that you can place anywhere in your template that you want to display a list of photos from a Flickr account.
Google recently releases its Plus One service, and, as usual, dozens of people immediately made WordPress plugins utilizing it. Google Traffic Pop by Tyler Quinn is an excellent example. In this tutorial, I’m going to demonstrate how to make a (very simple) Google +1 plugin for WordPress.
A lot of times people wish to place a front end login form on their Website, which helps to hide the fact that the site is running WordPress. This works great, except when a user has a fail login attempt. When that happens, they are automatically directed to the default wp-login.php, which is not good…
A lot of people want the ability to display the WordPress login form within the content of one of the site’s pages. By default, WordPress does not provide any way to do this, so we are going to write a really quick, simple short code to display the login form.
