WordPress has plugins as its integral part. And Plugin Development extends the core functionality of WordPress.

One question that comes directly to mind is whether we need to do it or not. My suggestion to you will be ‘depends’.

The community already has thousands of Plugins that could be great use to you. But sometimes more often you find a situation where nothing works for your requirement.

That’s where plugin development comes handy to you. Though it requires basic knowledge of PHP and Mysql. But that won’t stop you from learning and making something new.

So here are simple steps to start doing development.

Header in Plugin Development:

Plugin Name:

Plugin URI:

Description:

Author:

Version: 1.7.2

Author URI:

License :

Just all these things above will fill the formalities of creating a plugin. As it will tell WordPress and you both, for which purpose this plugin has been made.

License is another point that points out the cause. WordPress plugins are released under the GPL,mostly. So it is important to state the license.

WordPress Plugins comes with callback functions such as Hooks. And they further classified into Actions and Filter Hooks.

Hooks allow your plugin to ‘hook into’ the rest of WordPress; that is, to call functions in your plugin at specific times, and thereby set your plugin in motion.

Three important hooks are the register_activation_hook(), the register_deactivation_hook(), and the register_uninstall_hook().

Actions allow you to add or change WordPress functionality, while filters allow you to alter content as it is loaded and displayed to the website user.

All the above three are for doing the activation or deactivation and finally uninstall for uninstalling the plugin.