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…
Once you have created a custom post type with Easy Content Types, you will want to begin displaying entries from that post type. There are a variety of ways to do it, but one of the easiest by far is using the [ecpt_query] short code included with the plugin. This short code will let you…
Being able to restrict certain content to logged in members only is a very useful function, especially for membership based websites, whether free or premium. This quick tutorial shows you the basics of how to write a short code function that will allow you to limit blocks of content to logged in users only.
Plugin Action links are the links, such as Deactivate, that are displayed on the plugin entry in the WordPress plugins page. These links are extremely useful for helping your users find their way around the admin section of your plugin, as well as for providing helpful links such as Contact or Support.
This tutorial will demonstrate the methods used to write a simple Posts By Author Widget plugin. The idea of this plugin is to provide a widget that can be used to displays posts from a specific author. The plugin this tutorial is about is a much simplified version of the [highlight_green]Posts By Author Widget Pro…
Being able to display a list of posts within a page (or other post) is very useful. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to write a simple post query short code that will allow you to display a list of posts from any category, tag, or custom taxonomy.
This video will give you a quick demonstration of how to modify the Contextual Help tab on any WordPress admin page. This trick is particularly useful for users wishing to add extra information to an already-existing help tab, such as the one on the Themes or Plugins page.
The “Help” tab is a very underused, under rated, but fantastic tool for all plugin developers. If you’re not familiar with it, the “Help” tab is a little button in the top right corner of your WordPress dashboard that, when clicked, will bring in a nice slide-down panel with helpful information.
Especially when developing plugins or theme settings that make use of the WordPress media uploader to upload and insert images, being able to retrieve the ID of the image uploaded can be extremely useful. By grabbing the image (attachment) ID, you suddenly have a lot more control over what you can do with the image,…
WordPress provides a set of great tools for processing ajax requests in plugins (and themes). I’m going to give you a quick example of how these tools can be used to accomplish a variety of tasks. For this example, We’ll just be using some simple alerts, but they will serve very well for demonstration purposes.
