Best WordPress plugin development tutorials

November 11, 2013

WordPress is a great content management system. It is an open source CMS dedicated to mostly online bloggers. It gained lots of love from developer community because of its simplicity, and lots of love from bloggers because of ease of use while running great blogs. WordPress can now be easily called World’s most popular content management system.

One of the reasons this happened is of course WordPress openness to 3rd party plugin development. Which means that any developers who learn quite simple plugin creation rules can can extend WordPress, add new functionality or even integrate WordPress with any other popular CMS out there.

We have listed some great WordPress plugins in previous posts (best mobile plugins, plugins for integrating Facebook and others) and this time we have prepared the list of very useful WordPress plugin development tutorials. You will find how to create plugins, how to structure, design and install. This tutorial list is no short and suits everyone, from beginners to experienced WordPress plugin developers. Enjoy!

1. Writing a Plugin – WordPress Codex

This tutorial is by WordPress Codex team, the team which is behind actual WordPress development. Section of the tutorial goes through the steps you need to follow, and things to consider when creating a well-structured WordPress Plugin.

2. How to Install WordPress Plugins

Plugins are tools which provide additional functionality to your application. To install a plugin you generally just need to put the plugin file into your ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory. Once a plugin is installed, you may activate it or deactivate it from the Plugins menu in your WP administration.

3. Create WordPress Plugins with OOP Techniques

Building a WordPress plugin with an object oriented code is fairly clean and efficient if you will compare it with procedural code. You can expand using inheritance techniques, which could be very helpful when creating a large plugin.

4. WordPress Essentials: How To Create A WordPress Plugin

To create a plugin, all you need to do is create a folder and then create a single file with one line of content. Inside the new folder, create a file ending with the letters .php. Open the file in a text editor, and paste the following information in it. However, if you intend to distribute your plugin, you should add as much data as possible. With that out of the way, you can go into the back end to activate your plugin.

5. Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Plugin Development

In this tutorial there are basic steps required to create a simple WordPress plug-in. The functionality is used to create dynamic excerpts based on the number passed into the function call. You will just need to upload the plug-in file and activate from the Admin panel, then follow up by calling the function from whatever pages you want the excerpt to appear.

6. A Crash-Course in WordPress Plugin Development

When creating a WordPress plugin, the first step is to make sure that you have access to a WordPress installation. Create a plugins folder, then outline the plugins and afterwards create a filter. Filters are functions that WordPress passes data through, at certain points in execution, just before taking some action with the data. Then program a function for this plugin. Finally, return to your WordPress admin panel, and click on the “Plugins” tab.

7. Useful Tutorials For Creating Your First WordPress Plugin

WordPress plugins allow you to extend your default WordPress installation with almost any kind of functionality, you can download a vast collection of plugins from the WordPress plugin repository or you can create your own. This site has elaborated Cleary on how to go about it.

8. Create a Custom WordPress Plugin From Scratch

This tutorial describes the implementation of a WordPress plugin starting from scratch. The plugin will connect to an external OSCommerce database and display random products on your WordPress site. It also implements a configuration page for the WordPress admin panel.

9. Anatomy of a WordPress plugin

Creating a wordpress pluggin will only need a basic understanding of the PHP programming language and some information on how WordPress expects your plugin to behave. The simple steps to follow include:

Creating a pluggin template
Adding Functionality
Making the Widget
Creating settings menu for updating the widget preferences.

10. How to Write a Basic WordPress Plugin

Plugins for WordPress can be very elaborate and require significant programming expertise to develop. But learning to develop a WordPress plugin doesn’t have to be difficult; you can start small and grow your skills over time. The simple steps include naming your plugin file and subdirectory. Name using lower case and underscores. Add a plugin header and afterwards a filtering function and complete the plugin.

11. Writing Your First Plugin for WordPress: A Primer

In this tutorial, you will get an idea on the possibility of adding your own customized processes, enhancements and functions, without the need to touch the core system.

12. The Ultimate Guide to Building a WordPress Plugin

The first thing is to generate ideas and reasons to write a WordPress plugin. If your plugin idea seems simple enough to create from scratch, try using your plugin idea as your sample application instead of spending time building a useless application that you’ll never use, just for practice. Generally, the best practice is to start researching other existing plugins and work on ideas to improve them.

13. Building a WordPress plugin: Tweetable

This tutorial will guide you in creating a WordPress plugin from scratch that is tweetable. It will take in the latest five tweets and display them in your WordPress sidebar.

14. Create Database Tables for Your WordPress Plugin

Database tables are used to save info used by a plugin. To be able to develop your WordPress further, you need to learn how to work with and create more database tables. With a plugin specific table, you can define the precise data structure needed for your plugin development.