WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

It has been a while since I last developed a plugin for WordPress. With the release of version 3, I have been eager to learn about new improvements with plugin development. Having recently got hold of a copy of WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials (Packt Publishing, 2011), I’ve shaken the dust off my WordPress skills!

Whether you are a newcomer to WordPress, as long as you have some basic PHP knowledge, WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials provides a good solid foundation for how to develop your own plugins for WordPress. The book provides practical hands-on tutorials, best coding guidelines and good architecture advice for developing original plugins.

The first two chapters are aimed to ease you into preparing for WordPress, understanding the framework, setting up a development environment and an anatomy of a plugin.

Next few chapters are examples of specific plugin functionality. With the remaining several chapters focusing on the deployment, distribution and maintenance of your plugins.

If you are looking to get into plugin development, I’d recommend picking up a copy of WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials – while it is not intended to teach you PHP or MySQL, there focus is more on the core concepts, so even regular users of WordPress can delve into making their own basic plugins.

Having previous read (and reviewed) WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide, (Vladimir Prelovac, Packt Publishing, 2009), there are many similarities between both books. I’d say that WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials offers a broader scope and range of topics.

In particular I was impressed with the level of detail on how to use Subversion (Chapter 8), especially with how to overcome various errors and reverting to previous versions.

Standardized Custom Content (Chapter 6) is also a good resource if you are interested in pushing the boundaries of WordPress towards being a custom content management system.

Having had a fair amount of experience with developing WordPress plugin in the past, I was already familiar with most of the concepts – this book helped to reinforce those principles. If you are interested in learning more how to develop your own WordPress plugins, I would recommend that you pick up a copy of this book.