How to Create Your First WordPress Plugin

Do you want to create your first WordPress plugin? That turns out well. Together we will see how to create a WordPress plugin. WordPress has the distinction of being the most popular CMS in the world. In fact, more than 40% of websites use WordPress. It's also easy to find a plugin for virtually any task you want to accomplish. However, the ease of finding plugins comes with some problems. In this article, we will start by seeing how to create a WordPress plugin, taking a contact form as an example. Next, we will see why it may be interesting to create a plugin. Finally, we will talk about some recommendations from the WordPress community to create a powerful and secure solution.

1. Why create your own plugin?

Creating your own WordPress plugin can offer several advantages:

• Customization: You can create specific features tailored to your particular needs.
• Learning: Developing a plugin helps you better understand the inner workings of WordPress.
• Performance: A custom plugin can be lighter and more efficient than a generic plugin.
• Security: By controlling the code, you can minimize the risk of vulnerabilities.

2. Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following:

• A local or online WordPress site where you can test your plugin.
• A code editor (like Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, or Notepad++).
• Basic knowledge of PHP, HTML and CSS.

3. Basic Structure of a Plugin

Any WordPress plugin starts by creating a folder in the wp-content/plugins directory. In this folder you will need a main file for your plugin. For example, if your plugin is called "Contact Form Plugin", you can create a folder called contact-form-plugin and a contact-form-plugin.php file inside that folder.

Example of main file:

 <?php
/*
Plugin Name: Contact Form Plugin
Plugin URI: https://example.com/
Description: A simple contact form plugin.
Version: 1.0
Author: Your Name
Author URI: https://example.com/
License: GPL2
*/

// Plugin code here
?>

4. Creating a contact form

For this tutorial, we'll create a simple contact form that sends an email to a specified address. We will divide this into several steps:

4.1. Added contact form

Add a function to display the contact form in the main plugin file:

 function display_contact_form() {
?>
<form action="" method="post">
<label for="name">Name:</label>
<input type="text" name="name" id="name" required>
<label for="email">Email:</label>
<input type="email" name="email" id="email" required>
<label for="message">Message:</label>
<textarea name="message" id="message" required></textarea>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
<?php
}

4.2. Form processing

Add a function to manage the data submitted by the form:

 function handle_contact_form_submission() {
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
$name = sanitize_text_field($_POST['name']);
$email = sanitize_email($_POST['email']);
$message = sanitize_textarea_field($_POST['message']);

$to = '[email protected]';
$subject = 'New contact message';
$body = "Name: $namenEmail: $emailnnMessage:n$message";
$headers = array('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8');

wp_mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);

echo '<p>Thank you for your message!</p>';
}
}
add_action('wp_head', 'handle_contact_form_submission');

5. Recommendations for a powerful and secure plugin

Here are some best practices to ensure your plugin is efficient and secure:

• Sanitize user input: Use WordPress functions to validate and clean data.
• Optimize queries: Make sure database queries are optimized to avoid slowness.
• Security: Avoid SQL injections and XSS vulnerabilities by using WordPress query preparation and escaping features.
• Documentation: Comment on your code and provide clear documentation to help other developers.

By following these steps, you will be able to create a basic WordPress plugin and understand the fundamentals of creating plugins. Happy development! You can check out some plugins we developed here. We've also published a few on WordPress.org .