Lefebvre - WordPress plugin development cookbook: over 80 step-by-step recipes to extend the most popular CMS and share your creations with its community

Yannick Lefebvre is a plugin developer who has published eight projects to the official WordPress repository to this day. His first creation, Link Library, has been used on hundreds of sites around the world. With a background in Computer Science and working for Presagis a company providing software tools in the modeling and simulation industry he started writing plugins for his own WordPress site in 2004 and quickly started sharing his creations with the community. He is actively involved in the Montreal WordPress community and has presented multiple times at WordCamp Montreal. You can find out more about him and his plugins on his blog, Yannick's Corner (http://ylefebvre.ca).

I would like to thank the WordCamp Montreal organizers for giving me a chance to speak at multiple editions of the event, for creating great videos of the presentations, and giving me the opportunity to get involved in the community. This project would not have existed without them.

I would also like to thank Richard Archambault for his great feedback and encouragement during the writing process as well as the entire Packt Publishing team for proposing this great project to me and supporting me through the entire process.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents for always believing in me and encouraging me in all my projects.

Liina Buckingham has been developing websites since 2000. She is passionate about web usability, minimalistic design, and engaging content.

Joachim Kudish is a Web Developer specialized in WordPress development. He is currently employed at Automattic as a Code Wrangler. He works primarily at WordPress.com, while dabbling in several other of Automattic's web products. Previously, he was a freelancing web developer building high-scale WordPress sites and private WordPress plugins. He is author and contributor to several WordPress plugins as well as a contributor to WordPress core. He is originally from Montreal, Quebec but is currently located in Vancouver, BC. He is active in the local Vancouver WordPress community and is a regular WordCamp speaker.

Thank you Yannick for asking me to participate in the making of this book. It was a great learning experience and a true pleasure to be part of the project.

Developing plugins for WordPress is the next big thing for you if you are an administrator looking to enhance a personal site with custom functionality for which no plugin exists, a developer looking to enhance the WordPress platform with new ideas for the community, or a website designer building a specific project for a client. Learning how to create WordPress plugins will allow you to unleash the full potential of the most popular web content management system.

As an early WordPress adopter, I started building plugins to add functionality to my personal site. Once I got these new elements in place, I quickly realized that other users could benefit from these extensions, and started distributing them online. To this day, I always love hearing back from users of my creations and finding out how they have put them to use and what new functionality they think would make them even better.

While developing plugins might initially sound a little bit like black magic, this book shows you how easy creating plugins actually is through a series of step-by-step recipes. If you have previously added code to a theme's functions file, you may even be familiar with some of the mechanics explained in this book. With all of the information contained in this book, you will quickly be able to create your own plugins or dissect existing ones to add that extra bit of missing functionality that you require. Before you know, you'll be publishing your own creations to the official WordPress plugin repository!

Let's start learning how to cook up great WordPress plugins!