Plugin Development

Dive into the world of plugin development in WordPress, focusing on creating custom plugins to extend and enhance the functionality of your website. Learn about plugin development frameworks, best practices for coding, and how to submit your plugins to the WordPress repository. This tag is perfect for developers looking to build tailored solutions for their WordPress sites or contribute to the WordPress ecosystem.

How to Grow a WordPress Plugin to 20k Users in 12 Months

How to Grow a WordPress Plugin to 20k Users in 12 Months

Building a new WordPress plugin in a competitive market and scaling it to where it can become a profitable business is not easy. When using the freemium model, it can be even harder if you don’t get enough traction early on. This is an inside look at our experience growing the Spotlight Instagram Feeds plugin to 20,000+ active installations in 12 months.

Should WordPress Plugin Developers Offer Refunds?

If you’re a commercial plugin developer, one of the things you’re bound to come across sooner or later is a refund request.

You’d do well to decide from the onset what your policy on refunds is going to be. In this post I will take a look at the 3 most popular policies that I have come across, and my thoughts on each.

How to Preview Your Plugin’s Readme.txt File

The readme.txt file is an essential file when submitting plugins to the WordPress.org repository.

There is an excellent article on Smashing Magazine which highlights all the important things you need to know when creating a readme.txt file.

When you’re ready and want to preview how the file will look into the repository, you can use this tool.

How to Use AJAX in WordPress Plugins

If you’re creating plugins for WordPress, chances are you’ll need to use AJAX at some point. Today I want to share with you some of the best resources I’ve found while I was learning how to use AJAX in plugins myself. Hope you find them useful.

How to Properly Comment Your Themes and Plugins

One of the marks of a truly great WordPress developer, is his ability to include excellent commenting in his code. Go ahead, take a look at some of the plugins/themes by the best developers, and see how easy it is to read through their code. They adhere to the WordPress Coding Standards when writing HTML and PHP. There is also the CSS Coding Standards page on the Core Contributor Handbook, which is definitely another page to check out.

Today we will therefore look at the subject of commenting. I’m going to show you a few examples from top plugins and themes. We’ll be focusing on the use of commenting in the documentation of files and functions/classes, but we’ll also mention the normal comments you can sprinkle throughout your code.

How To Optimize WordPress Queries

Although WordPress is a system that performs well in general, it’s worth delving a bit deeper into performance considerations when building plugins and themes for general distribution. You never know who will be using your plugin or theme, it might be a site with thousands of posts. At that level, the difference between an efficient plugin/theme and one that is not will be very evident.

Preparing Strings for Localization in Themes and Plugins

Many plugin and theme developers fail to properly prepare their plugins and themes for localization.

I suspect that rather than an unwillingness on their part to do this important task, it’s instead a case of getting confused about what’s needed.

So let me give you some examples to show how easy it is to prepare strings for localization.

How to Override a Function attached to a Filter

These days I am experimenting more and more with building extendible WordPress plugins.

Today I’ll share with you a quick tip on how to override a function that is attached to a filter hook.