10 Tutorials To Kickstart Your Wordpress Plugins Development

dottony On May - 14 - 2010

Wordpress nowadays is the most popular open source blog system, it is almost de facto of blog industry standard, due to it ease of use and extensibility with their plugin management module, developer are freely to build their own custom plugin to add features to the system, examples by turning blog system into content management system(CMS), page specific SEO features, photo gallery, spam combating and more. The possibilities of building wordpress plugins is endless. I am sure you guys would be interest to build your plugins, perhaps for your own usage or for commercial purpose. While I developing my first wordpress plugin, I have documented some interesting tutorial and hope to be useful for you guys! Happy coding and build your first plugin today!

Begining Your Journey

Let’s get your self to familiar with what’s wordpress plugin is about and get your hands on it before getting too complicated. P/S: It’s for Beginner only.

Writing a Plugin

Strongly recommended you to read this tutorial from official wordpress site, it explains clearly what wordpress plugins is and file structure of a plugins. It also stated down each plugins file purpose and format to follow, including developer API and further reading materials for you. However, it might not be particular easy to digest for beginner as it is full with text and reading. Confused? Yeah, I bet it is. But, get a good grasp of it and move on.

Anatomy of a Wordpress Plugins

Yeah. Concept, concept and more concept. I firmly believe in building solid foundation will helps you geared out your development. This tutorial is from respective nettuts website. It cover pretty much the same from official wordpress site, but it is more illustrated and shown in clear steps and instruction. It covering how to build your widgets while explaining the concept and also how to write your widgets admin panel. It is a must read for beginner.

A Crash Course in Wordpress Plugin Development

A more detailed tutorial outlining the plugin structure and explain about what is filter, function and some short tutorial for your own plugin. It also include a video tutorial of explaining all this. It is concise and easy to pick up.

Tutorial to Write a Wordpress Plugin

A rather basic tutorial that teach you to setup your own plugin, not bad to get your first hands on.

Advanced Tutorial

Looking for building more complete plugins, need to further sharpen your plugin development skill, I bet you are, Here’s the section for you, hands on for more details tutorial.

Creating a Custom Wordpress Plugin From Scratch

Another wordpress plugin tutorial from nettuts that covering more details plugins setup with teaching you how to register action hooks, setting up plugin administration page, make use of the database connection, handling of database and building own use function in the templates. Pretty valuable to develop a more complete plugins, as it teach you to interact the database, setting up the admin page to customize user data and more.

How to Make a Social Bookmarking WordPress Plugin – Step by Step

Work on a more real life applicable plugins, learn how to develop your bookmark plugin one step at a time. This tutorial will teach you another level of knowledge with creating plugins and accessing API features of the social network system, not to forget admin panel, conditional tags and wordpress hooks.

The Utimate Guide to Building a Wordpress Plugin

It it not another tutorial that shows you to build a plugin, rather a source of compilation of where you can advance your wordpress development skill with breaking to a few section like accessing database, test environment, utilize javascript and css, internationalize and more.

Must Read for Beginner or Advance User

How to Write a Wordpress Plugin

One of the most complete wordpress plugin tutorial I have come across, it covers almost everything you need to know about wordpress plugins, a Must Read for beginner to advance developer. There are 12 set of tutorials covering different section. They also offer PDF tutorial for you to download, you could just print it out and start to chew the word.

Videos Tutorial

I guess too much of text might bored you, so I compiled a section of wordpress video tutorial for anyone that difficult to pick up at first, it is more details illustrated by moving pictures. Cheers!

Your First WP Plugin

A long time video tutorial about wordpress plugin, but I still think is valuable to share out.

Wordpress Plugin Development with PHP

Taken from a Webminar from seminar which cover advanced parts of plugins like action hooks, structure and more.

Final Thought

Enough is enough. I am afraid too much of tutorials at a time will make you confuse. Stick with these and have an action plan to learn one at a time. You will be a master in no time.