WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

The best WordPress plugin boilerplate you will ever need. Start developing your plugins straight away. All the basics are already covered for you. Just change the example content using the documentation provided and develop the rest.

What is this boilerplate designed for?

The boilerplate is designed for either free or premium plugins in mind. What I have done is set a developer friendly environment that allows you to get a head start with the ground work for any plugin. You don’t have to use all the features given to you so removing those parts is easy to do. With the boilerplate you also have actions and filter hooks in place that not only make it easy for you to create extensions for your plugin but for third-party developers as well.

What about support?

If the documentation provided doesn’t help you then you can use the forum topic to ask any questions about the boilerplate and either I or the community will respond.

Features

• Ready to build on and is third-party ready for other developers to build add-ons for your plugin.
• Custom settings page seperated via tabs and sections.
• Built-in System Status, giving a list of details about the site environment, plugins installed and current active theme ready for export when a user requests support for your plugin.
• Help Tabs on all the plugin pages ready and prepared.
• Tools prepared to help the user install pre-set pages required for the plugin, reset capabilities or simply start over from scratch.
• A full exposed 'Welcome' page, showing you all the display options along with slideshow gallery using prettyPhoto, social share buttons, shortcuts to other areas of your plugin and additional tabed content like 'Changelog', 'Credits' and 'Translations'.
• On the welcome dashboard, the 'Credits' page allows you to display the main creator/s of the plugin along with GitHub contributers and Translators from Transifex.
• On the welcome dashboard, the 'Translations' page displays the stats of the plugin being translated via Transfiex with shortcuts to translate a language directly.

Features Coming Soon

• Admin Pointers. – A simple class that also allows you to have more than one pointer per page.
• Import/Export – Allows you to import and export the plugin settings in json format and can be filtered either way.

Contents

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate includes the following files:

• This README.md
• CHANGELOG.md
• CONTRIBUTING.md
• license.txt file
• .editorconfig file.
• .gitattributes file.
• .gitignore file.
• .travis.yml file.
• .composer.json file.
• Gruntfile.js file.
• package.json file
• A subdirectory called wordpress-plugin-boilerplate that represents the core plugin file.

Installation

1. Copy the wordpress-plugin-boilerplate directory into your wp-content/plugins directory
2. Navigate to the Plugins dashboard page
3. Locate 'WordPress Plugin Boilerplate'
4. Click on Activate

This will activate the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate and we recommend that you install it on a development site not a live site.

Recommended Tools

Localization Tools

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate uses a variable to store the text domain used when internationalizing strings throughout the Boilerplate. To take advantage of this method, there are tools that are recommended for providing correct, translatable files:

• Poedit
• makepot
• i18n
• grunt-wp-i18n

Any of the above tools should provide you with the proper tooling to localize the plugin.

GitHub Updater

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate includes native support for the GitHub Updater which allows you to provide updates to your WordPress plugin from GitHub.

This uses a new tag in the plugin header:

* GitHub Plugin URI: https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>

Here's how to take advantage of this feature:

1. Install the GitHub Updater
2. Replace the url of the repository for your plugin
3. Push commits to the master branch
4. Enjoy your plugin being updated in the WordPress dashboard

The current version of the GitHub Updater supports tags/branches - whichever has the highest number.

To specify a branch that you would like to use for updating, just add a GitHub Branch: header. GitHub Updater will preferentially use a tag over a branch having the same or lesser version number. If the version number of the specified branch is greater then the update will pull from the branch and not from the tag.

The default state is either GitHub Branch: master or nothing at all. They are equivalent.

All that info is in the project.

Documentation

Documentation will be provided via the GitHub wiki pages. -- Coming Soon --

Support

This repository is not suitable for support. Please don't use our issue tracker for support requests, but for core WordPress Plugin Boilerplate issues only. Support can take place in the appropriate channel:

• The public support forum at SebastienDumont.com, where the community can help each other out.

Support requests in issues on this repository will be closed on sight.

Contributing to WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

If you have a patch, or stumbled upon an issue with WordPress Plugin Boilerplate core, you can contribute this back to the code. Please read our contributor guidelines for more information how you can do this.

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 GPL v2 or later; however, if you opt to use third-party code that is not compatible with v2, then you may need to switch to using code that is GPL v3 compatible.

For reference, here's a discussion that covers the Apache 2.0 License used by Bootstrap.