Writing WordPress Plugins for nOObs – Session Highlights

After welcoming everyone to WordCamp SF 2010, Niall Kennedy presented Writing WordPress Plugins for Noobs. It was very interactive with lots of slides and real-life examples.

Developing Plugins can be totally selfish and that’s OK!
This week the top corporate giants Google and SalesForce both released Plugins for their own capitalistic needs!
WordPress Plugins are in your Page, and not Javascript, so your plugin generated content will not disappear in Search BOTS / in SEO.
You can Cache your results with the Page by writing custom Plugins. This reduces stress on your host servers, resulting in faster page load times.
Google recently announced that they will penalize your site for slowness. If you look at your referral logs, 50 to 60% of your traffic is coming from search engines trying to index your site!
Developing a WordPress Plugin involves 2 main things, Actions and Filters.
Actions are like broadcasts. (Sounds like Events?). You can “hook into” a WordPress action to add your own action, implemented as a function in your plugin code.
Filters are what they sound like. Filters let you add or remove content in various sections of your blog. It is common to see filters also in Plugin code.
When writing Filters, make sure you ALWAYS return the variable. The worst thing would be to modify the variable and not return anything!

Niall ended the session in an interactive Question & Answer format with the geeky audience. The highlights for that Q & A are here.