Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development

1.1 Introduction

Hello, and welcome to this Tuts+ course on WordPress plugin development. In this course, you'll get a good grounding in all the different aspects of plugin development and what you need to know to write your own plugins. So we'll start by identifying when you should write a plug in instead of using the functions file. We'll then look at the structure of a plugin, and I'll use a big complex plugin like Woo Commerce to demonstrate how you should organize your own plugins. We'll then move on to some practical examples of plugin code. So I'll show you how to set up a plugin and how to do things like in queueing style sheets and adding include files, and then I'll show you some specific examples on how to write plugins to create things like widgets and short codes, and to query the database. We'll then pull together a bunch of the techniques we've used in the course to create a custom widget, which will register a post type, output a query, and add all those into a widget that you see here on the site. Watch this course and get a thorough grounding in how to write your own plugin.