WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Advanced

A standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress Plugins.

It forked from DevinVinson/WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate. In this version added:

• plugin settings functionality;
• shortcodes functionality and examples for it;
• widgets functionality and examples for it;
• meta boxes functionality and examples for it;
• class Plugin_Name_Helpers with static methods for global use;
• shared directory for both public and admin functionality.

Contents

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate includes the following files:

• .gitignore. Used to exclude certain files from the repository.
• CHANGELOG.md. The list of changes to the core project.
• README.md. The file that you’re currently reading.
• A plugin-name directory that contains the source code - a fully executable WordPress plugin.

Features

• The Boilerplate is based on the Plugin API, Coding Standards, and Documentation Standards.
• All classes, functions, and variables are documented so that you know what you need to change.
• The Boilerplate uses a strict file organization scheme that corresponds both to the WordPress Plugin Repository structure, and that makes it easy to organize the files that compose the plugin.
• The project includes a .pot file as a starting point for internationalization.

Installation

The Boilerplate can be installed directly into your plugins folder "as-is". You will want to rename it and the classes inside of it to fit your needs. For example, if your plugin is named 'example-me' then:

• rename files from plugin_name to example_me
• change plugin_name to example_me
• change PLUGIN_NAME_ to EXAMPLE_ME_

It's safe to activate the plugin at this point. Because the Boilerplate has no real functionality there will be no menu items, meta boxes, or custom post types added until you write the code.

WordPress.org Preparation

The original launch of this version of the boilerplate included the folder structure needed for using your plugin on WordPress.org. That folder structure has been moved to its own repo here: https://github.com/DevinVinson/Plugin-Directory-Boilerplate

Recommended Tools

i18n Tools

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate uses a variable to store the text domain used when internationalizing strings throughout the Boilerplate. To take advantage of this method, there are tools that are recommended for providing correct, translatable files:

• Poedit
• makepot
• i18n

Any of the above tools should provide you with the proper tooling to internationalize the plugin.

License

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is licensed under the GPL v2 or later.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

A copy of the license is included in the root of the plugin’s directory. The file is named LICENSE.

Important Notes

Licensing

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is licensed under the GPL v2 or later; however, if you opt to use third-party code that is not compatible with v2, then you may need to switch to using code that is GPL v3 compatible.

For reference, here's a discussion that covers the Apache 2.0 License used by Bootstrap.

Includes

Note that if you include your own classes, or third-party libraries, there are three locations in which said files may go:

• plugin-name/includes is where functionality shared between the admin area and the public-facing parts of the site reside
• plugin-name/admin is for all admin-specific functionality
• plugin-name/public is for all public-facing functionality

Note that previous versions of the Boilerplate did not include Plugin_Name_Loader but this class is used to register all filters and actions with WordPress.

The example code provided shows how to register your hooks with the Loader class. (http://devinvinson.com/contact/) .