In this course, I show you how to build a contact form plugin in WordPress. The idea here is for this to be an introduction to building WordPress plugins. So, it’s not everything you could ever want know, but you will learn some of the basics of WordPress plugin-building. Here’s a run-down of the things you’ll learn:

• How to Organize Your Files and Folders
• The WordPress Plugin Header
• Using PHP Classes With WordPress
• How to Build a Contact Form
• WordPress Action and Filter Hooks
• How to Create WordPress Shortcodes
• How to Add Custom CSS and JavaScript In WordPress
• How to Create a Custom Post Type
• The Proper Way to Handle Form Submissions
• Inserting Posts Into a Custom Post Type
• How to Send Emails In WordPress
• Handling Redirects With WordPress
• The Right Way to Add URL Parameters
• How to Add Custom Columns To a Posts Table

These are things you might expect to find in a course like this, but are NOT in here:

• Creating custom tables in WordPress
• Inserting data into custom table
• Adding custom menus
• Working with $wpdb

Basically, you can choose between using custom post types or custom database tables when storing data in WordPress. In most cases, custom post types are the way to go. So, that’s what I chose to do here. That’s the scope of this particular course. Other courses I do, I may go into custom tables. In any case, when you use custom post types, you don’t need to do any of the things listed above. WordPress does most of it for you… which is the benefit of custom post types.

Source code for the plugin is included.