My Blog

I recently had the opportunity to create a wordpress plugin for my company’s website. This is a simple plugin that associates blog posts to product pages on our shopping cart based on word press tags. The plugin simply displays links to the products page (based on the tags) on the wordpress post page for a given blog post.

First create a file in the wordpress plugins folder and add the following comments:

/*
Plugin Name: Article to Categories 
Plugin URI: http://www.foo.com/
Description: ...
Version: 1.0
Author: ...
Author URI: http://www.cnizz.com
License: ...
*/

WordPress will read in this information on the plugin page. Next we are going to hook into the core wordpress operations. Prior to this project I didn’t think much of wordpress. I viewed it as a great blogging platform with really horrid looking code, but the WP developers have a done a great job creating a really robust API. This hook will tell wordpress to call the show_category_pages_meta_box() function when it loads the admin menu. Now we need to define that function.

add_action('admin_menu','show_category_pages_meta_box');

This function defines a new meta box with an element ID of myplugin_sectionid. The title is Article to Categories and it will be displayed on post pages only. When loaded it will call show_category_pages() which will actually echo out the text to appear in the new meta box.

function show_category_pages_meta_box(){
	add_meta_box( 'myplugin_sectionid', 'Article to Categories', 'show_category_pages', 'post', 'side', 'high');
}

Finally we need to define show_category_pages() and populate our new meta box.

function show_category_pages(){
echo 'Some awesome product pages!';
}

Creating this wordpress plugin was pretty fun and I hope I get a change to do it again in the future.

Resources:
WordPress: Writing a Plugin
Plugin API
Action Reference

Related posts:

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Tags: api, php, plugin, wordpress

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 9:17 am and is filed under Programming, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.