Matthew Ray is a full-stack web developer working for the worldwide public relations firm, Weber Shandwick. He currently focusses his efforts on product development, plugin architecture, and service integration. In his free time, Matthew is an avid photographer, musician and bulldog enthusiast.
Anyone who has created a WordPress plugin understands the need to create configurable fields to modify how the plugin works. There are countless uses for configurable options in a plugin, and nearly as many ways to implement said options. You see, WordPress allows plugin authors to create their own markup within their settings pages. As a side effect, settings pages can vary greatly between plugins.
In this article we are going to go over three common ways you can make your plugin configurable. We will start by creating a settings page and create our fields using the default WordPress Settings API. I will then walk you through how to set up your fields with a custom handler. Finally, I will show you how to integrate a great configurable fields plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into your own plugin.
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In this tutorial, Matthew Ray will show you how to set up a GitHub repository to push updates to your plugin, wherever it resides. While you always have the option to use the WordPress Subversion repository, there may be instances where you prefer to host a plugin yourself. Perhaps you are offering your users a premium plugin. Maybe you need a way to keep your client’s code in sync across multiple sites. It could simply be that you want to use a Git workflow instead of Subversion. After reading this, you should be able to update your plugin by clicking the “Update now” button on the plugins page!
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