Writing your first WordPress plugin

Writing our first WordPress plugin is the best thing we’ve done last year. Here are 2 quick tips for developers who’d also like to start the amazing journey.

First, be familiar with the Actions and Filters in WordPress, the listed resources are worth reading:

1. If you just read one book about WP development, read Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Thanks to Chapter 3, I totally got the idea of what Actions and Filters are.
2. Actions list: find out which actions run during a typical request on front end or admin page. This is a good resource to figure out when to use which action hook.
3. Filters list
4. An article from Smashing Magazine on WordPress Hooks

Second, take advantages of Tom Mcfarlin’s WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. This boilerplate is fully-based on the WordPress Plugin API, which means it follows the best practices for plugin development, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

That’s how we wrote and published our first plugin Completely Delete in the last 7 days of 2013. Thanks to these great minds in WordPress community!