PHP South Africa workshop: Bending WordPress to your Will

As part of my overall goal to step up this year and get involved in more community conferences and such, I ran a workshop at PHP South Africa 2017 on building your first WordPress plugin. I titled the workshop “Bending WordPress to your Will” as it sounds fittingly dramatic I think. While most of the workshop involved building a basic WordPress plugin, I spent the first part of it going over some slides that cover the concepts of actions, filters and standard plugin structure.

Here are the slides:

Once we had gone through that content we went through a WordPress plugin together. In this case I created a basic plugin titled “Post View Counter” that does exactly what the title suggests – counts post views. We went through this and covered the initial functionality, followed by some creative ways of displaying the post view count.

You can find the plugin here on GitHub – I purposefully built it in a single file using procedural code so that it would be easier to follow in a workshop format.

Along with that, here are a few sites that I mentioned in the workshop:

If you were in the workshop I’d love to hear what you thought of it, so please leave a comment here! You can also give some feedback on Joind.in.