A few weeks ago, Brian Notess shared a great post on how to roll your own WordPress widget the easy way. In certain cases such as a time crunch or simple functionality, that works great.
But if you’re serious about getting into WordPress development, then learning how to build widgets, create plugins, and share your work with the community, then it’s important to learn how to do that using the WordPress API.
In this series, we’re going to be building a WordPress widget from scratch. By the end you will be familiar with the WordPress widget API, how to use the Codex for research for future development, and how to write your code in such a way that its maintainable by you and/or a team.
Introduction
Up until this point, we’ve published a few tutorials that provide general suggestions for how to structure your development environment, but this particular series is assuming that you’ve got a working installation of Apache and MySQL, that you’re comfortable with an editor, and that you have a working installation of WordPress.
If you don’t have any of the above, then I highly recommend getting setup first.
To get caught up, check out the following two posts:
- Installing a Web Server, Database, PHP, and Related Tools
- How To Setup a WordPress Development Environment
We are going to be using jQuery and although we won’t be writing full on plugin, it may help to be caught up with the library. If so, check out The Beginner’s Guide To Writing a jQuery Plugin.
Where are we headed?
Over the next several posts, we’re going to from idea to execution on a WordPress widget. Although the order is always subject to change, we’re going to be covering:
- Getting Started
- Understanding the WordPress Codex and the Widget API
- Writing Your Own WordPress Widget: Tweet It, Mockups
- Writing Your Own WordPress Widget: Tweet It, Iteration One
- Writing Your Own WordPress Widget: Tweet It, Iteration Two
- Writing Your Own WordPress Widget: Tweet It, Iteration Three
- Preparing The Widget For Release
As with all of the other 8BIT Tutorials, this page will act as the landing page for this series so be sure to bookmark it!
Brian Notess says
Now that I’ve hacked my way through two WP plugins, it will be nice to learn to do it the right way 🙂
Tom McFarlin says
😀
Eric J says
awesome i’m excited!
Tom McFarlin says
Awesome – looking forward to it!