Introduction to Plugin Development with David Dashifen Kees

WordPress Core empowers site editors to produce a site that helps visitors understand almost anything that someone wants to share with the world. But, even with the new theme features (like full site editing), without help from plugins, WP Core is limited to posts and pages. There are tens of thousands of plugins in the official repository, but what if none of them is quite what you want. Or, maybe features you need are locked behind a premium subscription and you're not quite ready for that sort of commitment. Or, maybe you just like to write your own code. Whatever the reason, there comes a time in almost every WordPress developer's life that they decide to take a crack at writing their own plugin.

In today's session, David Dashifen Kees (they/them), Senior Full Stack Developer at Georgetown University, will introduce plugin development. During it, they'll go over how to register a custom post type (CPT), one of the most common reasons for a custom plugin. They'll also touch on custom taxonomies and the registration of metaboxes to save metadata. Dash will likely briefly go over how those data might get displayed on the front end, but how to integrate a custom post within a theme, but time might limit our ability to go over this in detail.

The talk will be geared towards those with a fair knowledge of PHP. Unlike block themes, which focus on core Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, plugins still require quite a bit of PHP in their production. Dash tends to lean in an object-oriented direction in their PHP style, but it's not important that your style match theirs; the core WP topics will work with procedural code or OOP.