Why And How To Create A WordPress Plugin?

WordPress is the most popular CMS on the web. The big advantage of WordPress is its modularity, the CMS offers you many basic functionalities and you have the option of installing new plugins or creating yours to add functionality. Here we will describe how to create a WordPress plugin

Many plugins exist, whether to integrate e-commerce functionalities, sliders or even member spaces. However, the themes available on the market do not necessarily meet your expectations, both in terms of performance or functionality, and in many cases it is necessary to create your own WordPress plugin.

Why develop a WordPress plugin ?

First of all, seeing the benefits of developing a custom WordPress plugin.

If you need new features, creating a new plugin will allow you to reuse it on many sites. You just need to develop the plugin and each time you need to integrate this element on a site, you will just need to install the plugin. In the long term, the creation of different WordPress plugins will save you time when creating different websites.

In terms of maintenance, using a WordPress plugin will allow you to quickly update all of your sites. So, if your plugin is used on many sites, you will just need to update the main plugin and you can automatically deploy your update to all sites.

How to create a WordPress plugin ?

Implementation of files

Now let’s get to the heart of the matter, how do you create a custom WordPress plugin ?
To start creating our plugin, we will create a new folder called “mon-plugin”, modify the name of the folder to match your plugin. This folder will include all the files necessary for the proper functioning of your plugin.

In this folder, create a new file called mon-plugin.php, this is the basic file that will include all of the functions to implement new features at WordPress.

Information about your plugin

Now that you have created the base of our plugin, we must indicate to WordPress various information, such as for example the name of the plugin, the name of the author, etc… All the elements are available on the official documentation.

To provide these elements, we will use a comment system in our main mon-plugin.php file, here are the different options available to you :

• Plugin Name: This is the name of your plugin.
• Plugin URI: Address where more information can be found on your plugin.
• Description: A short description of your plugin.
• Version: The current version of your plugin, this will be used to indicate to WordPress if an update is required.
• Author: The name of the author of the plugin.
• Author URI: The address of the author’s website.
• License: The plugin operating license.
• URI license: The address allowing access to the list.
• Domain Text: This value indicates the field of translations in case you want to make your plugin translatable.
• Domain Path: Relative path of the file in which the translations are located.

Here, your plugin is now ready to be installed, go to the administration space of WordPress, in the “extension” menu then in the “Attlement installed” section. You can now activate your plugin.

For the moment, your plugin does not add any new functionality, but this is installed. Now you just need to integrate the different functionalities you want to add to your plugin.

Create a new shortcode in your plugin

For the moment, our plugin is empty. In this section, we will now see how to create a new shortcode which will be activated at the same time as your plugin. For this example, we will create a shortcode allowing to display a block with a particular formatting.

We will therefore create new files in our plugin :

• A / shortcode / folder that will include the code for incorporating the new shortcode
• A / css / folder that will include the style sheets needed to display the shortcode.

Now let’s create two new files :

• /shortcode / my-shortcode.php: the declaration of shortcode
• /css / style.css: the style sheet

Edit my-plugin.php file

include (‘shortcode / mon-shortcode.php’);

add_action (‘wp_enqueue_scripts’, ‘theme_enqueue_styles’);

function theme_enqueue_styles () {

    wp_register_style (‘mon-plugin-style’, plugins_url (‘css / style.css’, __FILE__)););

}

The first line is used to include the code to generate the shortcode and the rest of the code allows us to load our style sheet.

In the / shortcode / shortcode.php file, simply add

if (!function_exists (‘register_mon_shortcode’)) {

function register_mon_shortcode ($ attrs, $ content = null) {

return ‘

‘.$ content.‘

‘;

}

add_shortcode (‘mon_shortcode’, ‘register_mon_shortcode’);

}

In the style.css file, add the following code :

.my-shortcode {

display: block;

padding: 30px;

background-color: red;

color: #FFFFFF;

}

And here we can now use your shortcode in the content of your site, which will display a red block: [my_shortcode] Hello [/ my_shortcode]

Then customize your WordPress plugin to perform the functionality you want.
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