WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate serves as a foundation and aims to provide a clear and consistent guide for building your WordPress plugins.

Features

The Plugin Boilerplate is fully-based on the WordPress Plugin API
Uses PHPDoc conventions for easily following the code
Liberal use of TODO to guide you through what you need to change
Uses a strict file organization scheme to make sure the assets are easily maintainable
Note that this boilerplate uses plugin.po to provide a translation file. This is compatible with POEdit

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate includes the following files:

This README
A subdirectory called plugin-boilerplate

Copy the plugin-boilerplate directory into your wp-content/plugins directory
Navigate to the Plugins dashboard page
Locate the menu item that reads TODO
Click on Activate

This will activate the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. Because the Boilerplate has no real functionality, nothing will be added to WordPress; however, this demonstrates exactly how your plugin should behave as you're working with it.

If you opt to uncomment Line 77 which contains the following line:

add_action( 'admin_menu', array( $this, 'plugin_admin_menu' ) );

Then a new menu item will be added to the Plugins menu.

License

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is licensed under the GPL v2 or later.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

Changelog

2.1.0 (9 May 2013)

Refactoring the ternary operator in the constructor to make the code more readable for developers and to avoid returning an orphaned object
Updating certain function names to use verbs to be clearer in their purpose
Updating versioning in the plugin and in the README to use the x.y.z convention rather than the x.y convention
Adding class property DocBlocks
Adding @since tags to each of the DocBlocks for methods
Cleaning up the PHP code formatting for easier readability
Adding a note about POEdit and it being used as my preferred translations
Automatically displaying the name of the plugin admin page
Changing 'directives' to 'tags'
Updating page-level DocBlocks for plugin.php and for uninstall.php

2.0.1 (7 May 2013)

Updating the year of the release of 2.0

2.0.0 (7 May 2013)

Disabling the admin menu by default
Initializing the attributes
Combining the admin_open and admin_close into a single admin view
Bringing some of the code up to the WordPress coding standards
Added access modifiers for functions
Implemented the single pattern
japh. Merged upstream changes, maintained separation of uninstall functionality
mikkelbreum. Restricted scripts and styles to load only on plugin settings page if it is enabled.
mikkelbreum. Added the option for a plugin settings page
mikkelbreum. Removed the need to customize the URL for wp_enqueue_style and wp_enqueue_scripts
mikkelbreum. Corrected action book for register_admin_styles
tbwiii. Listed jQuery as a dependency for both JavaScript sources
japh. Added an uninstall.php placeholder
leewillis77. Improved the way language files are loaded
wesbos. Updated the year to 2013

1.0 (29 November 2012)

Official Release

Author Information

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was originally started and is maintained by Tom McFarlin, but is constantly under development thanks to the contributions from the many WordPress developers throughout the world.

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