Developing Plugins With wpgen

Wpgen is a free, open source CLI utility that helps you to rapidly develop WordPress plugins. After building hundreds of client plugins throughout the years, I created wpgen to avoid common, repetitive and boilerplate tasks associated with WP development (such as managing plugin architecture, creating and querying custom post types/taxonomies, creating, saving and securing custom fields/metadata, administration screens, modelling data/relationships, REST API controllers, package/dependency management, etc).

Wpgen combines an opinion on how a plugin should be structured into a component-model based architecture alongside a series of code generators (ie: create:plugin generates the plugin structure, create:admin creates an admin options screen, component:post-type generates a custom post type, create:bb-module creates a custom BeaverBuilder module, create:api-controller, generates a REST API controller, etc). In addition, it provides an interface for rendering both simple and arbitrarily complex, reactive custom form fields. In a matter of minutes, you can generate a plugin, model/scaffold your custom data structures via components (custom post types/taxonomies/meta, etc), then get straight to actually programming your custom business logic needs.

We use wpgen to save time at ClockworkWP. While most generators are universal for WP development, some generators complement our workflow (ie, the BeaverBuilder module generator). Because of its consistent component structure, wpgen generators are compatible with other wpgen-created plugins, making it perfect for team development. Once you’ve created a plugin using the wpgen plugin strategy, you’ll feel at home working on other plugins.

The presentation will include a technical demonstration of wpgen and its features, an explanation of its architecture choices and option interfaces. By the end, we should have an example custom WP plugin, possibly designed/guided by the audience (we’ll have some planned suggestions in-case nobody has any good ideas on the spot).

Suggested audience: anyone not afraid of the terminal, who is comfortable with PHP (at minimum, you’ve played with functions.php before), and interested in building quality WordPress plugins. Skill level is not as important because of procedure, but because wpgen is built on top of WP concepts (post types, taxonomies, meta, options) you should have some experience with these WP fundamentals. wpgen is like having a calculator vs pen and paper– you still need to know your basic arithmetic.

https://wpgen.org
https://clockworkwp.com

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