WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner's Guide) book

WordPress has come a long way in the past couple of years. The amount of usage has increased considerably and it is now the blogging platform of choice for many big online names.

As the WordPress monster grows, so does the community surrounding it. Plug in developers and theme designers are all around, but what if you want to become part of this community and don’t know where to start? There are currently a sprinkling of books to tutor plugin developers and theme designers, but more are starting to appear.

WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide) has been written by Vladimir Prelovac and is published by Packt Publishing. The book comes in paperback format and contains 278 pages. It consists of eight chapters, six of which deal with WordPress plugin development from scratch.

Vladimir knows what he is talking about when it comes to WordPress plugins, he has developed quite a few and talks about these plugins in the book.

If I were a WordPress plugin developer I would seriously consider buying this book. This is what Vladimir has to say about it:

What you will learn from the book

Get to know the WordPress code base, WordPress’s plug-in architecture, and the plug-in application programming interface (API) and learn how to hack it

Master the WordPress database and the API – access and manipulate data, handle user roles and permissions, posts, and so on

Hook into the rest of WordPress using actions and filters

Change the way your WordPress backend looks by customizing menus, submenus, and the plug-in admin panel

Integrate AJAX and jQuery into your plug-ins to dynamically generate content

Hook directly to WordPress edit pages and use AJAX to generate fast searches

Integrate your plug-in with WordPress panels and the tinyMCE editor

ccess and work with third-party APIs like Flickr

Implement localization support for users of other languages

Maintain and manage your plug-in using SVN and publish it to the WordPress Plugin Repository

Handle security issues and make your plug-ins safer to use

Who this book is written for

Anyone who wishes to engage in WordPress development, from beginners to seasoned developers. The examples grow in complexity so that beginners are able to easily follow and for the veterans out there I have couple of handy tricks (security, optimization and general programming) in every chapter.

Ideally you need to be familiar with basics of PHP. The book also utilizes jQuery – handy JavaScript framework – for handling live visual effects and Ajax.