Pimp Your WordPress Plugin

Most WordPress Plugins are little more than small utilities but there are a growing number of them that can dramatically augment the way WordPress behaves or give WordPress advanced new features.

Platform Modifying Plugins

I like to refer to these plugins as Platform Modifying Plugins (PMPs or Pimps) because even though they exist in the same repository with all these other smaller, utility plugins, they are more substantial with more features. A few examples of PMPs include BuddyPress (and my own lighter-weight alternative — Mingle), NextGEN Gallery, WPTouch, Pretty Link and Formidable. Many of these PMPs have also become platforms themselves sporting their own hooks and APIs — with other 3rd party plugins in the repository that alter their behavior.

In my presentation at OC WordCamp, I’m going to show you an effective way to develop your own PMPs using a Model View Controller (MVC) approach with some additional tips and tricks that I’ve learned from coding and supporting two different PMPs.

Model View Controller

Even though there is no right or wrong way to program a WordPress plugin (as long as it works and doesn’t blow up the user’s website) — when writing a PMP, special thought should be given to how your it will be structured. One common design pattern to create a robust web app is MVC. Many other development environments across several other languages such as Spring (a Java Web Development Framework), Struts (another Java Framework), Ruby on Rails (an outstanding framework that I’ve used on many other projects), Cake (a pure PHP framework based on Rails) and even the iPhone Development Framework utilize an MVC approach.

I’ve found using a very lightweight, MVC approach in my development efforts has helped me to handle the complexity that can come in when writing a PMP.

• MVC can make a larger code-base more manageable
• MVC can make it easier to write more stable code
• MVC can make it easier to pinpoint bugs and performance bottlenecks
• MVC can make it easier to work along side other developers
• MVC can make your plugin easier to readable and therefore extend-able by other developers

My WordCamp Presentation

So in addition to this focus on MVC, I’m also planning on sharing some other extremely valuable tips for those wanting to start their own PMP… I’m planning on covering the basics of the following items (hopefully I’ll have time to cover them all):

• Routing Admin, Front end and AJAX requests through your Plugin — I really wish I knew some of this information when I first started writing wordpress plugins. These ideas (especially the AJAX routing) were based on some suggestions I got from Brandon (the organizer of ocwordcamp) — but building a routing concept into your plugin can save you countless hours of user support, debugging and bug fixing.
• Optimizing your Plugin — I think that most plugin developers don’t really consider the impact their plugins can have on memory consumption, page loads, etc. Well, when you are putting together a PMP, you can really wreak havoc on your users systems so this is critical.
• Translating your Plugin — There’s a lot of documentation out there for this — but I had some issues when I first started getting this to work in Mingle. I’ll cover some of the gotchas that I had so that hopefully you can get over some of the troubles I had.
• Deploying your Plugin — This is an often overlooked topic for plugin developers. Many of them aren’t familiar with SVN or have no clue how to put together a process so that deployment is a seamless, repeatable process. This becomes even more critical when you start translating your plugin and if you do a premium version of your plugin. I’ll try to break down the steps I go through to create a release of my plugin.
• Database Management — If you’re writing a PMP you will no doubt be adding  tables to the WordPress database. I’ll show you how I create, update and migrate these tables. Also, I’ll show you some easy conventions (taken from Rails) that will help you clean up your database tables for you and others looking at them.

I’m really pumped about this presentation and my other one on Premium Plugins — hope to see you at both of them!