The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Part 2: Developing a Plugin

In the first part of my series, an introduction to the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, we looked at how the code is organised within the Boilerplate. To continue with this series, we’ll apply what we’ve learnt previously to build a real working plugin. We are going to take a look at how quickly we can get our plugin up and running using the Boilerplate code, with as little work as possible.

This article will focus on creating and activating the plugin, as well as developing the admin facing functionality of the plugin. In order to follow this tutorial, you’ll need a basic understanding of PHP and WordPress, as well as having a working knowledge of the WordPress Plugin API.

About the Plugin

We’re going to develop a simple plugin that will display the number of days since a specific post was last updated. We’re also going to offer a couple of simple customizations to the plugin, allowing the user to choose a specific number of days after which a post will be considered outdated, as well as the position of the notice in the post content.

Preparing the Boilerplate

As mentioned in the first article, we can either download a fresh copy of the Boilerplate and do the search and replace ourself, or we can use the unofficial WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generator to speed up the process. Let’s use the generator for our plugin.

Head over to the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generator website and fill in the form with the appropriate values. Let’s just call our plugin “Outdated Notice”. Here’s a sample form with the fields filled in.

Continue reading %The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Part 2: Developing a Plugin%

by Firdaus Zahari via SitePoint