A brief introduction to WordPress plugins

WordPress offers one of the most flexible plugin architectures compared to other similar frameworks such as Joomla! and Drupal. The existence of over 20,000 plugins in the WordPress plugin directory proves the vital role of plugins. In typical websites, we create simple plugins to tweak theme functionalities or application-specific tasks. The complexity of web applications forces us to modularize the functionalities to enhance the maintainability. Most of the existing application developers will be familiar with the concept called Open Close Principle.

Note

Open Close Principle states that the design and writing of code should be done in a way so that a new functionality is added with minimum changes in the existing code. The design should be done in a way that allows the adding of the new functionality as new classes, keeping the existing code unchanged. Refer to http://www.oodesign.com/open-close-principle.html for more information.

We can easily...