Front end registration and login forms (meaning placed within your site’s pages, and not the default wp-login.php) are one of the elements that really take a site out of the “standard WordPress” zone. With forms that allow your users to signup and login without ever leaving your main site, you provide a much more consistent [...]
View Post forms, login, registration, short codePart seven of Writing Your First WordPress Plugin concludes the series by demonstrating how to extend the plugin options that I showed you in part 6, and how to use them to control various aspects of your plugin’s output, such as turning it on or off and changing theoutput’s theme. There is not a lot [...]
View Post options, settingsIn part 6 of Writing Your First WordPress Plugin, I’m going to continue where we left off in part 5 and demonstrate how to create your plugin settings form. We will create a complete settings page that allows you to save your plugin options to the database easily from the Settings page that we added [...]
View Post add_options_page, options, register_setting, twitterIn part 5 of Writing Your First WordPress Plugin, I’m going to take you through the process of adding an admin options page to your first WordPress plugin. This options page will allow your user to configure the settings for the plugin very easily. In this case, we’re going to use it to allow the [...]
View Post add_options_page, admin_menu, register_settingWordPress 3.3 has a really nice new Help menu that can be used by plugin and theme developers to show a lot of helpful information to the users. It’s very similar to the Contextual Help Tab, but allows much more information to displayed in a more organized fashion. Instead of all content being displayed in [...]
View Post 3.3, add_help_tab, contextual help, help tab, toolbarIn order to be kind to our friends that do not speak the language we have written our plugin in, it is always a good idea to fully localize your WordPress plugin. This means make it “ready for translation”. If you are one of those that is blessed with the fluency of more than one [...]
View Post international, localization, localize, translating, translationThis tutorial explains the process behind writing a Maintenance Mode plugin for WordPress such as the one I released a few days ago: CGC Maintenance Mode. The final result of this tutorial will give you an advanced plugin capable of putting your site into maintenance mode, while allowing authorized users to view the site normally, [...]
View Post IP, maintenance, restrictIn 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 [...]
View Post add_action, CSS, wp_enqueue_script, wp_enqueue_styleIn 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 [...]
View Post the_contentKnowing 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 [...]
View Post plugin, plugins