One of the best ways to get better are writing plugins is to look at existing plugins and figure out how they work. In this part of Plugin Development 101 we are going to look at the Featured Comments and dissect it line-by-line in order to learn exactly how the plugin works. It is a relatively…
A feature you will often see large plugins provide is the ability to import and export their settings, making it much easier to migrate sites or to simply replicate the same setup across multiple sites.
Template files are very standard for themes and heavily used in child themes. For example, if a user wants to modify the layout of their site pages, they can simply copy page.php from their parent theme to a child theme, modify the HTML structure, and the changes will be reflected on the site. While it’s…
WordPress has some really awesome functions and classes for retrieving data from the database: WP_Query, WP_User_Query, get_comments(), get_the_terms(), and many, many more. Most of the time these are the functions and classes you should use when querying data from the database–they have some great benefits, such as caching–but there are times when it is actually…
The gettext filter is a really handy filter that I’ve written about before. The filter provides a way to easily change international-ready text via a simple filter call, but it can also have a serious impact on performance if overused.
WordPress 3.7 introduced a new function called wp_extract_urls(). This is a handy function that allows you to extract URLs from text strings. Simply pass the text string to the function and it will return an array of URLs.
In this final part of the User Follow System tutorial series, we will create two short codes, one for displaying a follow/unfollow link for a user and one for displaying a list of recent posts from users you (the currently logged-in user) follow. We will wrap up the series by also showing a few areas…
In part 5 of this tutorial series we wrote the Javascript that is responsible for firing off the ajax events when a user is followed or unfollowed. Now, in this part, we are going to write the PHP side of the ajax events that takes care of processing the requests and sending a response back…
If you want to restrict menu items to active subscription holders, or members of specific subscription levels in Restrict Content Pro, the Menu Item Visibility Control will make your job pretty easy and provide complete control.
It is becoming more and more common for plugins to provide template files that can be copied to a theme’s folder and then safely modified. This means that the site owner that is using the plugin can add, remove, and modify the markup of the plugin without hampering the upgrade process when new versions are…
In part 10 of Plugin Development 101 we are looking at how to create your first OOP-based plugin. This entry is part 11 of 14 in the Plugin Development 101 Series
When you write plugins that depend on others, such as extensions for Easy Digital Downloads, you often need to check if the dependent plugin is active and only perform certain actions if it is. There are several ways to check if a plugin is active and I’d like to walk you through some of them.
WordPress 3.6 introduced a new API called the “WordPress Heartbeat”. This is the API that behind a lot of the improvements in WordPress 3.6, including better revision tracking, user’s session management, and more. I’m going to show you a quick example of how you can use the API to perform “live” actions. What is the…
WordPress 3.6 introduced the new get_attached_media() function that makes it really simple to retrieve all media attached to a specific post.
WordPress 3.6 introduced quite a few new functions that are helpful when working with media attached to a post. One of my personal favorites is a helper function that lets you retrieve the URLs of images that have been inserted as parts of galleries in the post.
