Beginning to use Wordpress

[Tommybs]

When it comes to site design I've always tried to do everything including designing the aesthetics and the code behind. Just recently though I decided to play around with Worpress as a CMS solution and I was pleasantly suprised with it. I was able to get 2 sites up and running pretty quickly (albeit with default themes)and within a day and armed with a good tutorial I was even able to create my first theme.

The problem I do have however is that now I wish to further expand my out-the-box wordpress solutions. I know there are a variety of plugins but does anyone know of any good tutorials for developing your own plugins? I personally find the wordpress documentation to be very poorly written and have had better success following other tutorials. There may be no point in re-inventing the wheel though if I can find what I want elsewhere, so does anyone know of any decent sites or a better directory of wordpress plugins tthen the one at the official site?

Many thanks

[ergophobe]

I wonder if you might consider coughing up some money for an actual book.

First off, I am not recommending and have not read the book I'm about to mention and there may be others - this is just the first one that seemed really on topic. Okay?

With that disclaimer.... there is a book called WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner's Guide), by Vladimir Prelovac (looks like it just came out in January)

The reason I mention this is because after hemming and hawing for ages, I finally coughed up the money and bought John Van Dyck's Pro Drupal Development and by the middle of chapter 2 I was kicking myself for not having bought it the second it came out. It is just so much better - both the writing and the format - than the online resources. The amount of time I could have saved myself would have been immense. Before I even reached the halfway point, the book had saved me so much time already with an ongoing project that I felt I had easily been repaid the purchase price.

Obviously, that's a review for another book and it has nothing to do with your situation, just to say that a good book, that is well-thought out, will just save you so much time over the online resources in my experience.

It's funny, but I never felt any need to buy a book on PHP, for example, because it's just syntax and if you know a little programming, learning PHP is simple. But the internals of some of the CMS systems are complex and not at all intuitive (not illogical either, just very difficult to reverse engineer by looking at code).

So that's not a real answer, but hopefully a useful suggestion. If you do buy the book, it would be great if you came back and let us know whether or not it was as helpful to you as Pro Drupal Development has been to me.

[Tommybs]

Thanks for replying. I noticed that book a lot when I started my intial searches. The thing is I, I know enough PHP etc. that I could but together what I wanted and "bolt" it on to the side of my wordpress installation no problem. I'd just like to do it properly so I could make it available to other users. I understand what you are saying about books though, i have a huge collection as I prefer to have something in front of me rather then flicking back and forth between my editor and and online tutorial. In this instance however I don't think I'm really prepared to spend some money on it at this stage. I think the wordpress documentation could drastically be improved. The theming section was all over the place and as soon as I found a hands on tutorial elsewhere it all seemed so easy. I guess I just want something similar to that but for a plugin. I only need to know how to create a simple "Hello World" example and I could take it further from there.

Thanks for taking the time to reply though. I'll have a look around and see if I can find what I'm looking for, I would post the url here if I do but don't want to break TOS so will just have to remember it if anyone else wants the same information.

many thanks

[ergophobe]

Well, I know some PHP too. In fact, for a few years I was a moderator of the PHP forum here.

But as someone with a bit of a programming background, I nevertheless found having a book on Drupal really useful (Drupal, I would say, is quite a bit more complex than WP though).

Anyway, WP ships with the Hello Dolly plugin, which is essentially a Hello World plugin, packaged with WP simply to get you started on simple plugins. So that would be what you need.

If you search Google on "first wordpress plugin" you'll find a video by Mark Jaquith, one of WPs lead developers. Very basic, but maybe enough to get started.

[Tommybs]

Thanks again. I did actually look "Wordpress Hello World" in the end and found something exactly what I'm looking for starting at the basic hello world and moving up into admin functions etc. Hopefully I can now develop some great plugins to enhance my sites and who knows, maybe even get some time to promote them and dare I say it...get traffic!

[ergophobe]

>>dare I say it...get traffic!

Think big ;-) Although it never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to get a tiny bit of traffic. Big traffic is a challenge though.