We’ve been able to get quite a bit accomplished so far in the Intro to WordPress Plugin Development series. Next, we’ll be diving into creating our own custom shortcodes next. What are WordPress shortcodes? According to the WordPress codex, shortcodes were introduced to create macros to be used in a post’s content. So, what does…

We’ve done a lot to advance on the basics of WordPress plugin development during the Intro to WordPress Plugin Development series. Next, we’ll look at how to properly load scripts and styles. The wrong way to load a script or style It is possible to load a script or style into the site header using…

In this section of the Intro to WordPress Plugin Development series, we’re going to learn how to add a menu to the dashboard with our plugin. Menus in WordPress can be overused by plugins. Some plugin developers feel that their plugin should have its own top-level menu when it’s really a plugin that belongs nested…

In the previous part of the Intro to WordPress Plugin Development series, we talked about how to add menu links to the dashboard. We briefly touched on adding content to the page that the link points to, but that content isn’t particularly useful. What we need is a way for users to interact with our…

Data sanitization and validation are two very important topics to be aware of when building a plugin. Your plugin will be writing, reading, and editing data in the database. Whenever you interact with the database, you open the possibility of bad things happening. What is data validation? Data validation is basically a way to make…