5.1 Conclusion

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts Plus course on WordPress Plugin Development. In this final part of the course I'm going to include by recapping on what you've learned as you've gone through the course. Now you may remember that we've now developed three plugins which do quite different things. The first one was designed to set up section menus. So if I go into the Locations page here, you can see there's a section menu for my location section of the site. And this works with a site that's built at hierarchical pages. So if I go into one of those locations, that locations menu stays the same. And we did this by writing a plugin. So if we go into our Plugins folder. We've got the Tuts Plus section menus plugin, which includes firstly, a check for the top level page, finding out if the current page is the top level page, or if it's a page higher up. Using that, and feeding that as an argument to get pages function, fetching a list of the pages that are in that part of the site, using the site hierarchy. So that was the first plug-in we created. The second plug-in was designed to customize the dashboard. So we customized our main dashboard screen by removing a whole load of widgets and adding this new welcome widget. So again, we created a plugin for that. If I go into my plugins folder, I've got Tuts Plus customize admin here. And this has a number of functions in it. The first one removes some dashboard widgets. The second one adds that new welcome widget. And you'll remember that I spent some time internationalizing all that. And then the final plugin that we developed was one to output a list of recent posts from each of three randomly selected categories at the bottom of single posts. So if we go to a single post here, scroll right down to the bottom, we have our latest posts. So we have one in the Applications category, one in Basics and one in Essentials. And again, we wrote a plugin for this. And this was called Tuts Plus category posts list. So within that, we used the get categories function to fetch three random categories. And then we set up a query using WP query. We also use this do not duplicate array of variables to ensure that we didn't duplicate any posts across categories. And then finally, we include a style sheet, and we edit styling so that our list would show each post side-by-side. This would have given you a taster for the different kinds of things that you can do with plugins, and the way that you need to go about setting them up. Why not try adapting some of these plugins for using your own site to do something slightly different. I hope you found this course useful. Thanks for watching.