How to start Wordpress plugin development

Hi hope you’re all doing great!

I am trying to find good tutorials on how to develop a Wordpress plugin using HTML, CSS, JS, PHP and MySql.

I am searching to be able to build a front end booking system that has a backend dashboard to manage the bookings and connected to different APIs such as Google Calendar, Google Sheets etc.

I know that in the front end I will absolutely need CSS, HTML and JS. But I am a bit lost on how to structure everything and how to keep all the secret data only available in the back-end (I think I have to code most of it in PHP).

Thanks for your help!

1 Like

I had the same question. looking for professional guidance.
I’m stuck to chose between android development or Wordpress plugin development.
it would be greatfull for me thanks in advance.

Hey @juanjosejame and @soni

My suggestion would be to code this without doing so inside a plugin. If once you get everything working the way you need you can then wrap the code inside a plugin. Personally I almost never do, I much prefer writing this kind of thing in a “Custom Page Template”.

Two plugins that may really be helpful are these:

This one because you cannot run php code inside the WordPress editor. This allows you to write a piece of php code and then just insert it’s shortcode into the editor. You could of course do this longhand, but I find doing it with code snippets helps me organize.

The second is:

ACF is really very excellent. This is my favorite way to persist information in a highly organized way to the database. Give the piece of data a name, save and retrieve it at will using a slick syntax.

There are lots of tutorials on ACF, and that is very helpful as well.

Good luck - and have fun!