Wordpress Series: Coding Your Way Via Plugins

Today's article is another part of the wordpress tutorial series I've recently started, and which targets handling the concept of how to create your own Wordpress Plugin via coding.

Still not sure what wordpress is? In a nutshell, it is basically a Content Management System (CMS) for building websites. Still not there? Simply check out my the definition in my prior article here Retrieving Wordpress Custom Posts Via Ajax

Oh and if you've missed prior entries in the tutorial, you can check out the first two parts:

• How To Properly Customize Your Wordpress Installation .. Via Coding
• Securing Your Wordpress Installation

What is a Wordpress Plugin?

Generally speaking, a plugin is an additional tool on top of an existing solution. It allows you to perform a task that is not by default supported as part of the platform at hand.
A wordpress plugin is basically just that. It is an additional functionality that is not normally available as part of your standard wordpress functionality, and is normally aimed at upgrading your site/solution to accommodate for your needs.
There are literally thousands of plugins already available for wordpress. As of now, there are over 53,000 plugins hosted on the official wordpress plugins directory
While there might be many others hosted elsewhere, yet the former is the easiest and most accessible platform for hosting wordpress plugins.

Why create your own plugin?

So while there are that many wordpress plugins, which could basically expand the functionality in tons of ways possible, yet there are at times, many reasons why you would want to create your own plugin, including but not limited to:

• Existing wordpress plugin is too bulky: many plugins cover a wide range of functionality, and hence can bulk up your site's site and slow its performance. And we don't want that.
• Existing wordpress plugin potentially badly implemented: While many plugins are of high quality, and you can normally assess the quality via reviews and ratings, yet some plugins can cause harmful or unneeded outcome to your site, not to mention potential conflicts with other plugins.
• Your functionality is not covered already: which makes it a necessity to build a new plugin (for really minor changes, you can also use different ways for customizing your wordpress install, as mentioned in our prior article How To Properly Customize Your Wordpress Installation .. Via Coding)

How complex is building a plugin?

It might be a daunting task in other platforms and/or frameworks, yet with wordpress, the process is essentially quite easy that almost anyone can do it, even with minor knowledge of programming.
Preferably that knowledge would be in PHP (the server side language used by wordpress), MySQL database NOT being a necessity (as wordpress can handle that layer for you via its interfacing functionalities), and some Front end scripting is useful (a combination of HTML+CSS+JS/JQuery) for building the interface and interacting with it.

Steps in building the plugin

Create the plugin's file structure

The plugin's file structure can be as minor as a single folder with a single PHP file. Chose the name of your plugin to conform to what the plugin is aimed at, especially if you plan on sharing this plugin with others, for example My plugin for saving data and then name your folder and single file (at least one PHP file is required) according to that standard (my-plugin-for-saving-data and my-plugin-for-saving-data.php).
Check the below structure of a plugin that I created called Woo Product Remover

A readme.txt file is not required yet is helpful, especially to highlight what the plugin provides in terms of functionality, but also as the official documentation for anyone using the plugin.

Code structure

As mentioned above, creating the plugin requires a single php file. While for larger plugins, you can have thousands of files and folders, but for the wordpress install to identify this to be a proper plugin, there are minor structural requirements needed at the level of that one php file.
This includes having a proper header in the my-plugin-for-saving-data.php example file, which would go as follows, all inclusive including the opening and closing /* */ which identify a comment section in PHP:

/*
  Plugin Name: My plugin for saving data
  Plugin URI: http://www.mypluginforsavingdata.com/
  Description: My plugin for saving data allows my wordpress site to cook, bake, and do my laundry :d
  Version: 1.0.1
  Author: Mystery user
  Author URI: http://www.mysteryuser.com
  License: GPLv2
 */

A sample screenshot from that woo product remover plugin's core PHP file:

Script your plugin

From now on, it's up to your coding skills. In fact, you can either opt for scripting your plugin via functional programming (just plain standard code), or via object oriented coding (which involves creating classes, and initiating them).
The easier approach would definitely be the former approach, especially for newbies. Using this option, you can basically start typing whatever you would like your plugin to accomplish, and then once the plugin is activated, the code will run.
It is very common though to rely on wordpress hooks and filters, to properly time the moment at which the plugin's code will run and where its affects will happen.
Looking at the code sample shared above, you can notice the use of one sample hook

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'gk_wpr_prod_admin_menu' );

which basically handles making the plugin accessible via adding a relevant tab to wordpress' left menu, for the plugin to be available via the backend for logged in users.

Location of your plugin

Once ready, the plugin is required to be placed within your wordpress installation's plugins folder, otherwise wordpress will not be able to recognize it as an available plugin. If you look into the prior screenshot for with file structure of the plugin, you will notice the plugin is place within the
wp-content\plugins\ folder

Activating your plugin

Activating your plugin is just a piece of cake. You would just need to:

1. login to your wordpress installation (http://wordpresslocalurl/wp-admin/)
2. chose from the left tab your plugins --> installed plugins.
3. scroll to your relevant plugin
4. click on the Activate button
5. If all your code works well, your plugin would become properly activated, as shown below

That's it! no further steps needed to create a plugin.

Hope you found this as useful and helpful as intended.

Photo Credits: All images used in this article are either created by me, or available under CC license (labeled as reusable under google image search)

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