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PROFESSIONAL WORDPRESS® PLUGIN DEVELOPMENT
Second Edition
Brad Williams
Justin Tadlock
John James Jacoby
FOREWORD
This book will teach you how to develop for WordPress. WordPress has, over the past two decades, grown into the CMS that powers more than one‐third of all websites. If you're proficient at WordPress development, you'll never be out of a job again.
Starting out as a simple blogging system, over the last few years WordPress has morphed into a fully featured and widely used content management system. It offers individuals and companies worldwide a free and open source alternative to closed source and often very expensive systems.
When I say fully featured, that's really only true because of the ability to add any functionality needed in the form of a plugin. The core of WordPress is simple: you add in functionality with plugins as you need it. Developing plugins allows you to stand on the shoulders of a giant: you can showcase your specific area of expertise and help users benefit while not having to deal with parts of WordPress you don't care or know about.
When I wrote the foreword of this book's first edition, nine years ago, I'd just started my own company. That company has since grown to consist of 100+ people, and our plugins are used on more than 10 million sites—all through the power of open source and plugins.
I wished that when I started developing plugins for WordPress as a hobby, almost 15 years back, this book had been around. I used it as a reference countless times since, and I still regularly hand this book to new colleagues.
The authors of this book have always been a source of good information and wonderful forces in the WordPress community. Each of them is an expert in his own right; together they are one of the best teams that could have been gathered to write this book, and I'm glad they're here for a second edition.
WordPress makes it easy for people to have their say through words, sound, and visuals. For those who write code, WordPress allows you to express yourself in code. And it's simple. Anyone can write a WordPress plugin. With this guide in hand, you can write a plugin that is true to WordPress’ original vision: code is poetry.
