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

Contents

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate includes the following files:

• This README
• A subdirectory called plugin-boilerplate

1. Copy the plugin-boilerplate directory into your wp-content/plugins directory
2. Navigate to the Plugins dashboard page
3. Locate the menu item that reads TODO
4. 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

Important Notes

Licensing

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is licensed under the GPL2+ or later; however, if you opt to use third-party frameworks such as Bootstrap in your work, then you should be aware of this:

The most likely occurrence of this issue is with Themes developed using Twitter Bootstrap. When reviewing such Themes, please be sure to check that, if the Theme is licensed under GPL, that the license specifies either unversioned GPL, or GPLv3.0.

For reference, here's the full conversation.

Assets

The assets directory provides two files that are used to represent plugin header images.

When committing your work to the WordPress Plugin Repository, these files should reside in their own assets directory, not in the root of the plugin. The initaly repository will contain three directories:

1. branches
2. tags
3. trunk

You'll need to add an assets directory into the root of the repository. So the final directory structure should include four directories:

1. assets
2. branches
3. tags
4. trunk

Next, copy the contents of the assets directory that are bundled with the Boilerplate into the root of the repository. This is how the WordPress Plugin Repository will retrieving the plugin header image.

Of course, you'll want to customize the header images from the place holders that are provided with the boilerplate.

For more, in-depth information about this, read this post by Otto.