Create your own powerful, interactive plugins to extend and add features to your WordPress site Everything you need to know to develop your own plugins for WordPress Walk through the development of five plugins from ground up Prepare and release your plugins to the WordPress community Avoid common mistakes made by most plugin developers by learning more advanced development patterns In Detail WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building blogs and general websites. By learning how to develop and integrate your own plugins, you can add functionality and extend WordPress in any way imaginable. By tapping into the additional power and functionality that plugins provide, you can make your site easier to administer, add new features, or even alter the very nature of how WordPress works. Covering WordPress version 3, this book makes it super easy for you to build a variety of plugins. WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is a practical hands-on tutorial for learning how to create your own plugins for WordPress. Using best coding practices, this book will walk you through the design and creation of a variety of original plugins. WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plugins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches in a series of easy-to-follow and informative steps. You will discover how to deconstruct an existing plugin, use the WordPress API in typical scenarios, hook into the database, version your code with SVN, and deploy your new plugin to the world. Each new chapter introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials is packed with information, tips, and examples that will help you gain comfort and confidence in your ability to harness and extend the power of WordPress via plugins. A step-by-step guide for creating feature-rich plug-ins for WordPress What you will learn from this book Get to know the WordPress code base, WordPress' plugin architecture, and the application programming interface (API) Integrate with third-party APIs and web services Hook into the WordPress internals using actions and filters Customize your WordPress Dashboard with menus and administration panels for your plugin Streamline user interactions by using jQuery to make AJAX requests Expand your understanding of WordPress as a CMS Implement localization support for users of other languages Maintain and manage your plugin using SVN and publish it to the WordPress Plugin Repository Write tests into your code to ensure that it is always deployed properly Approach This book will provide an easy to understand, step-by-step approach to building your own WordPress plugins from scratch. We will construct a variety of plugins from the group up, demonstrating how to tap into a number of WordPress' development aspects, as well as how to prepare and release your plugin(s) to the public. Who this book is written for This book is for WordPress users who want to learn how to create their own plugins and for developers who are new to the WordPress platform. Basic knowledge of PHP and HTML is expected, as well as a functional knowledge of how WordPress works from a user standpoint.