WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

Learn core WordPress concepts and components to create modern WordPress-based solutions

Key Features

• Learn the foundations of WordPress development and its hook-based architecture
• Choose the right components for any development task
• Build flexible solutions that works with existing plugins and themes

Book Description

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and is the ideal way to share your knowledge with a large audience or build a profitable business. Getting started with WordPress development has often been a challenge for novice developers, and this book will help you find your way.

This book explains the components used in WordPress development, when and where to use them, and why you should be using each component in specific scenarios. You begin by learning the basic development setup and coding standards of WordPress. Then you move into the most important aspects of the theme and plugin development process. Here you will also learn how themes and plugins fit into the website while learning about a range of techniques for extending themes and plugins.

With the basics covered, we explore many of the APIs provided by WordPress and how we can leverage them to build rapid solutions. Next, we move on to look at the techniques for capturing, processing, and displaying user data when integrating third-party components into the site design.

Finally, you will learn how to test and deploy your work with secure and maintainable code, while providing the best performance for end users.

What you will learn

• Explore the role of themes, plugins, and built-in features in development
• Adapt to built-in modules and built-in database structures
• Write code for WordPress's hook-based architecture
• Build, customize, and integrate WordPress plugins
• Extend themes with custom design templates
• Capture and process data with built-in features and custom forms
• Improve usability with AJAX and third-party components
• Manage non-functional aspects, such as security, performance, and migration

Who this book is for

This book is for web developers and site owners who want to build custom websites with WordPress. Basic knowledge of PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is required to get most out of this book.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to WordPress Development
2. Managing Database Structure, Storage and Retrieval
3. Designing Flexible Frontends with Theme Development
4. Building Custom Modules with Plugin Development
5. Extending Plugins with Addons, Filters and Actions
6. Practical Usage of WordPress API's
7. Managing Custom Post Types and Processing Forms
8. Discovering Key Modules in Development
9. Enhancing Security, Performance and Maintainance

Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake is a freelance web developer, writer, and open source enthusiast. He has over 9 years of experience in developing WordPress applications and plugins. He develops premium WordPress plugins for individual clients and the CodeCanyon marketplace. User Profiles Made Easy and WP Private Content Pro are the most popular plugins developed by him. Rakhitha is the creator of WPExpertDeveloper, where he shares his latest WordPress plugins. Building Impressive Presentations with impress.js was his first book, which was published by Packt Publishing. He is also the author of the first three editions of WordPress Web Application Development. In his spare time, he likes to read books and spend time with his family.