Starting With WordPress Plugins

A "lightning talk" given regarding some of my experiences in building and getting my first plugin approved for distribution by WordPress.org

Transcript

1. What This “Lightning” Talk Will Cover  Introduction.  About WordPress.  Recap: What Are WordPress Plugins?  Objectives For My First “Public” Plugin.  My “Day Spelled” Plugin – What It Does  “Day Spelled” – Nuts & Bolts  Elements Of The Framework Used  Some Surprises and “Gotcha’s” encountered.  Conclusion. Starting with WordPress Plugins
2. Site “Go Live” – For Better Results Introduction  Last November 20th, my plugin “Day Spelled” was accepted for distribution by WordPress.org .  A brief overview of: • How I went about building this plugin. • Some of the lessons Learned.  But this is not a “how to write plugins” tutorial!  For a guide to building WordPress plugins, please refer to our April 2015 talk by Hugh Lashbrooke. Starting with WordPress Plugins
3. Total web sites globally > 150 million (estimate). WordPress: Content Management System (CMS) As of end October 2015: • Sites running on WP are 25% of global total (est.) • WP estimated to have 58% of CMS market. (Notable other major contenders; Joomla, Drupal) WP is open source; it is free! WordPress is built on a foundation of PHP. Starting with WordPress Plugins About WordPress (WP)
4.  WordPress architecture: an open platform! Plugins: enable the community to augment and/or manipulate functionality of a WP site. • Plugins allow extensions to WP via the latter’s A.P.I. Without change to any of the core WP files. Just like WP itself, plugins are written in PHP. You can make your own custom plugin to extend WordPress anyway you see fit. Plugins distributed via WordPress.org must also use the GPLv2 code license. Starting with WordPress Plugins Recap: What are WordPress Plugins?
5. Previously wrote 8 / 10 “quick-and-dirty” plugins for home use – simple play stuff, nothing original. Leverage existing know-how (PHP, CSS, HTM etc.) Next  a “formal” plugin qualifying for distribution by WordPress.org (“industrial strength”.) Erect a framework with all needed bells & whistles. (Invest a one-time effort for acceding to WP niche ecology.) Satisfy the WordPress criterion – Not done already. Simple guinea-pig plugin; infrastructure the priority Last but not least; have fun & add new tools/skills  Starting with WordPress Plugins Objectives For My First “Public” Plugin
6.  WP shows its articles’ creation dates by default. (Precisely where displayed depends on theme you use.) What if you want to insert within the body of a page, text-box, widget etc. a current or future date?  Display a date with day & month named, overriding default if it was set to mm/dd/yy, dd month yyyy, etc. To personalize an article, to emphasize a deadline or the timing of an event, ( in contrast to dd/mm/yy) Automatic translation to the language of the given locale.(e.g. French day & month names in France.) Starting with WordPress Plugins The “Day Spelled” Plugin – What it Does
7. The plugin defines its own custom “Shortcode”. These are like text macros in MS Word. Insert anywhere in WP, the shortcode : [dayspell when=‘yyyy-mm-dd’]  e.g. Beware of pranksters on [dayspell when=’2106-04-01’].  Beware of pranksters on Friday, April 1, 2106.  Default to current date if ‘when’ parameter omitted. Somes 60 lines of PHP code, that also: • Give day, month name in langs supported by WP locales. • Do comprehensive validation of parameter “when” • Generate diagnostics (at this time) also in French, German Starting with WordPress Plugins “Day Spelled” Plugin – Nuts & Bolts
8. Elements Of The Framework Used (Minimum)  WAMP stack on local host. • Win, MySql, Apache, PHP • phpMyAdmin  Wordpress under WAMP.  Dreamweaver used as IDE • Also built-in FTP client!  “TortoiseSVN” client*, with local subversion repository*.  WordAster.com website: • Plugin’s Home page*. • Author home page*.  “Poedit”; code translations.  ZIP file compression* S/W.  Paypal donate link / button  Plugins’ readme.txt* validator from WordPress.org Starting with WordPress Plugins ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Note that star’ed text correspond to elements expected by WordPress.org
9. Set-up of a sub-framework to translate code / strings • Poedit, POT (Portable Object Template), .PO & .MO files • Effort to understand and learn their operation badly under- estimated. Wordpres.org’s plugin readme.txt; • Highly specific content and format requirements with its own markup language • Very finicky and time-consuming the 1st time around. As source to load the initial plugin’s zip code; • WordPress.org wanted a plugin home page from me. • WP relented since then, can now use other (e.g. Github). Starting with WordPress Plugins Some Development Surprises & “Gotcha’s”
10. The basics of writing plugins actually quite simple. Time from start to finish some 3 / 4 weeks part-time. WordPress.org generally helpful & accommodating; • e.g. My plugin was reviewed & approved within 36 hrs.  Doing this imparted great sense of accomplishment. Parting thought: Go write a plugin! - Thank you for your attention. – Wordaster.com George Gombay Starting with WordPress Plug In Conclusion