Admin Notices provide a an easy to use tool for plugin and theme developers to show messages and warnings in the WordPress Dashboard. The admin_notices hook is what we use to display our messages, however, this hook will only display messages in the regular Dashboard and not the Network Admin dashboard for multi site installs.…
The Transients API in WordPress is a simple method for storing cached data in the database. It allows us to take resource-intensive queries and store them in temporary caches to improve performance. Transients are temporary, meaning that after a specified amount of time, the cached data will be deleted and re-cached, or updated. This quick…
Event calendars are pretty complex and difficult systems to build. There are lots of plugins that provide a range of functionality, everything from really, really simple events management, to full blow event calendar layouts, ticket purchased and more. A lot of people, however, are very unsatisfied with the available options, either because they are too…
Action hooks are used in WordPress to perform functions, or “actions”. They are used throughout many plugins and themes to provide an easy way for users of the theme or plugin to modify the output or the way it functions. This quick tutorial will give you a good introduction into how action hooks work.
Easy Content Types is a very powerful plugin that makes it really easy to setup custom post types, taxonomies, and meta boxes. One of great but lesser known features of the plugin is that it has an API built in to allow users to register their own custom meta field types that can be used…
Restrict Content Pro, my plugin that allows you to easily run a premium subscription site with WordPress, has a very flexible registration form that is easy to add extra fields to. Want to add a field that stores extra information about the registering user? That’s easy! Want to add a new checkbox that users must…
In part three of the User Submitted Image Galleries series, we’re going to look at automatically creating our “guest” user account, and process the image uploads from the submission form. This is where our plugin really begins to take shape. After this section, we will get into actually displaying our images on the “gallery” page.…
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…
Nonces are used to add an extra layer of security to WordPress. They are typically used when submitting form data to ensure that the form is being submitted from where it’s supposed to. Nonce fields help us protect our forms from malicious attacks and non-authorized submissions. This tutorial will introduce you to using nonces in…
Filter hooks in WordPress provide a very powerful way to “alter” the output of functions. Using filters we can easily add extra HTML to some functions, and strip HTML from other functions. Some filters, such as the “body_class” filter, allow us to modify the class names of an HTML element, and some filters have nothing…
