Outline for How to Build a WordPress Plugin Project [Feedback Wanted!!!]

Zac,

I'm glad to see that you're covering an often neglected side of plug-in development - Launching and Supporting a WordPress Plugin

This will be fantastic Zac Gordon and tie in really nicely with Randy Hoyt and Andrew Chalkley teachings. Was just thinking to myself today...how shall I implement this Google map on a page. Shall I just grab a plugin and use those options or shall I mess around doing it as a one off in jQuery and PHP.

If I really knew how to use WordPress's plugin engine....I could do a contact/about us page plugin and use it over and over again.

By the way....we've got to come up with a better name for contact and about us pages as there's more things and interactivity to put on them. Maybe Bio???

great to read about the new wp content - thanks. I like the most: Building & Launching

It would be outstanding, if there's a sequenz about testing my plugIn or meet quality criteria to get listed at wp.org.

I'm already excited about the challenges and/or quiz you will include.

@Matthew: fully agree to the more interactive contact & about pages.

Just realized there will also be a working with AJAX video under the templates and widgets stage :)

No time frame yet I can say. Still in the writing phase, although have solidified the outline. As soon as I have the details I will let everyone know and post it on the roadmap.

However I can say that we plan to release the entire project at once, so instead of having to wait for each stage you can do them all right away. This will take a couple extra weeks but we've had really good feedback on doing this with other courses.

Zac Gordon - to add to my previous comment, I think a Treehouse group project to make a proper import/export plugin would be awesome. Something that actually zips the files, database, your menus, images...the works, and is a click of a button and installed.

I may be missing something but reading around the net, there's nothing that seems to do it and there is NOTHING more annoying then uploading from local to live and having to repeat a load of work. It's nothing difficult, major or project breaking but it is very annoying.

Awesome. Is that also going to include filters, and actions in depth?

What sort of time frame are we talking for the release of all the content in the original post? i am really interested in the short codes etc all the little detail bits to add to a theme that make them good quality.

Hey Zac Gordon , I really liked the API JSON section of this course and have used it successfully to create a plugin to pull personal bandcamp releases into WordPress (no need to create custom posts or products etc.)...

There is one thing that I am having difficulty with though - The bandcamp API lets you pull the discography in one JSON file which contains information about each release (similar to the Treehouse profile info), but it does not provide the complete information. To get each release's tracks and further info, there is a separate call to each album_id or track_id using a different url for each.

I have written a number of options and cannot quite seem to get it. To make it clearer, I call the discography much like the treehouse profile in this course... but then I loop through each result and pull out "album_id" and "track_id". I then store them in arrays $album_ids and $track_ids, then need to run a foreach( $album_ids as $album_id ) { get each albums json feed and store it in database to call upon }.

I'd like to make this populate the database in the most efficient way possible so it does not slow down page loads or anything, although, if I can make the API work from the admin, so frontend just calls the DB, that would be awesome and not matter so much about the speed.

I hope this makes sense and that I have posted in the right place to get your help. Thanks!

I ended up getting it under control by creating extra functions as you said for albums loop and tracks loop... I stored it in the same table between the first and the time updated. I managed to get some php to display everything but its not quick enough and I need to create a thumbnail layout of album covers, then click one and it loads that albums player and playlist into the page. That way it doesnt load all 69 releases on page load. Thanks for your insight :)

I think it would be great if you could do a tutorial of how to create a shortcode but then add it to the tinymce?

Could just start with creating a simple shortcode that just returns a string and then one that returns attributes too.

Many Thanks