WordPress plugin development

Group your blocks in their own inserter category A plugin with many blocks should not scatter them over “Text”, “Media” and “Design”. Its own category in the inserter keeps them together and makes them easy to find. WordPress 5.8 renamed the filter for it to block_categories_all; the old block_categories still works but is deprecated.

Wrap multi-table inserts and updates in MySQL transactions with START TRANSACTION, COMMIT and ROLLBACK via $wpdb.

Learn which WordPress sanitisation and escaping function to use for each data type to prevent XSS and SQL injection.

Register self-closing and enclosing WordPress shortcodes with attribute validation and secure output escaping.

block.json in WordPress: apiVersion, attributes, supports and registration Since WordPress 5.8 a block can be described completely in a block.json file. It is the single source of truth for the block: name, title, category, icon, attributes, supported features, scripts and styles. WordPress reads it in PHP with register_block_type() and in JavaScript, and enqueues the assets…

Learn the difference between WordPress actions and filters with real code examples you can use today.

wp_remote_post(): send JSON with a token and handle the errors Sending data to another service is a daily task: an order to a CRM, a form to a mailing service, an event to a webhook. wp_remote_post() is the WordPress way to do it. It works on any host (cURL or PHP streams, whatever is available),…

wc_get_product(): read and change WooCommerce product data A WooCommerce product is a post, but its data (prices, stock, SKU, dimensions, gallery) is managed by WooCommerce’s product classes. Since WooCommerce 3.0 the right way to read and change it is the product object returned by wc_get_product(), with getters like get_price() and setters plus save(). Reading post…

Register a custom post type in WordPress the right way WordPress has two built-in content types, posts and pages. As soon as a site needs structured content of another kind (portfolio items, events, team members, properties), putting it into posts with custom fields gets messy: the blog list mixes articles with team profiles, the editor…