Chapter 6: Exploring Plugin Development Best Practices
In This Chapter
Exploring best practices
Naming, filing, and locating your plugin
Internationalizing your plugin
Starting to develop WordPress plugins is relatively easy. It’s much more difficult to develop WordPress plugins well.
The key to doing development well is to stick with a set of standards that ensures that your plugin is well designed and implemented. A set of standards that many people can agree upon are typically referred to as best practices. By adopting best practices as your own personal development standard, you ensure that other developers can easily understand your plugin’s structure and code. Doing so makes collaboration much smoother. In other words, if all WordPress plugin developers followed best practices, the WordPress development world would be a happier and more productive place.
This chapter delves deeper into best practices and is dedicated to taking your plugin quality to the next level.
Adding a File Header
The most fundamental best practice when creating WordPress plugins is to ensure that your plugin has a file header at the top of the main plugin file. As discussed in Chapter 5 of this minibook, ...
