Making the most of Plug-ins at WordCamp Toronto
October 5th, 2008
I had an amazing conversation with Brandan Sera-Shriar during lunch here at WordCamp Toronto. He is involved in a lot of very interesting projects and is also a teacher at a College!!!
Building plug-ins in Wordpress is very easy and does not need a lot of programming knowledge. A great way to get started is to take a plug-in and copy and paste the code and develop a new one.
There is a limit to what a plug-in can do and will want to customize it to whatever you want. Look is just as important as functionality in a successful plug-in.
HTML/CSS, PHP and MySQL skills are great to have
Check out the source of the plug-ins and make small changes. See what the effect is. If the plug-in is from a good source then it will be well documented. This is the best way to learn. Do this on your local host so that you don’t crash your site.
Design a basic template that you can use overall when designing multiple plug-ins.
He does not release his plug-ins to the community however if you do want them he will make it available to you
Plug-in 101
- Create a folder in the /wp-content/plugins/pluginname/
- Give the plug-in a name.
- Describe, authors. This is standard stuff.
- Comments section
- Add code for option menu
- Setup the Options Page
- Register the activation and deactivation hooks
- Function
- Save as a php file
Side bar info…
Can have one database for multiple sites with different look and feel.
Wordpress plug-in competition is coming up for 2009.
Tags: WordCamp Toronto, wordpress