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…
In this part of Plugin Development 101 we take a look at another of the most important tools plugin developers use every day: actions. Just like filters, the presence of actions throughout WordPress are one of the elements that make plugin development possible, so having a good understanding of what they are and how they…
There are a lot of ways to query posts in WordPress and a lot of parameters you can use for pulling in just the data you want. For example, you can easily pull in just posts that are in category X, Y, or Z, and you can also just as easily pull in only posts…
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at WordCamp Kansas City titled “Modular Plugins”. The talk was focused on the idea of writing extensible code when building plugins. I’d like to continue a discussion of the same topic here.
A live search is a search form that displays the results for your search query as you type. When done right, they can be exceptionally nice to use, and going through the process of building one covers a lot of really important techniques that can be applied to many other areas as well. This in-depth…
Easy Digital Downloads is a plugin I have been building for selling digital downloads through WordPress. It is completely free and very flexible. Due to a large number of actions hooks and filters, there are many ways that you can customize the plugin to best suit your needs. This tutorial will walk you through the…
In the Jobs Posting with Easy Content Types and Gravity Forms tutorial, we used Gravity Forms to create a submission form for users to post their job openings. In this tutorial, we are going to create our own custom submission form. While we will focus the form around job submission, the techniques used here apply…
After watching a Twitter discussion this morning (shown in the image below), Helen Hou-Sandi, a WordPress developer and core-committer mentioned a function I had never heard of that can be used for finding the name of the current action or filter hook. It is called current_filter() and is extremely useful. Check out the snippets below…
Some hooks get fired more than once, meaning that functions connected to those hooks are ran multiple times. This causes problems with some functions when they are designed to only be run once. If you have a function that is connected to an action hook, and you need to ensure it only ever runs once,…
Part 6 of User Submitted Image Galleries will show you how to setup the single image page that shows the details for a particular image. This section is not very complex, but it covers a few very important techniques that are really good to know when it comes to modifying information on post templates via…
Restrict Content Pro is my premium content plugin that makes it very easy to sell subscriptions to your WordPress website. It is the plugin that powers the subscription system to this site. This subscribers’s only tutorial is going to walk you through the process of adding new form fields to the registration form, and then…
Action hooks allow us to make our plugins much more extensible, and some times we need to be able to check whether a hook exists, or has been registered. We might need to check that a hook exists for a variety of reason, and thankfully WordPress gives us a really easy way to do that.…
Episode One of Plugin Thoughts discusses the method of using action hooks and filters in your WordPress plugins to make them more extensible and easier to modify / extend for other developers and users. This entry is part 1 of 9 in the Plugin Thoughts Series
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.
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…
