Since I am new to WordPress plugin development I have been examining the internal structure of many plugins. I have found that most of them don’t fit any pattern and so understanding how they work can be difficult.
I was wondering if there is more generalized way of plugin development, possibly with a framework, other than the methods described in official documentation.
AFAIK, there’s no official/standard framework, and there will be as many plugin development styles as there are shades of white in north pole.
I’d say WordPress Coding Standards is a blueprint for a good style.
You’ll find lots of good examples and excellent coders here in WPSE. A nice starting point: questions/tagged/plugin-development.
Highlighting:
- Objective Best Practices for Plugin Development?
- framework for plugin/theme options panel?
- What Plugins Demonstrate Great WP Plugin Development?
Nowadays, I use Plugin Class Demo from @toscho as base for many plugins.
Right now, @Pippin is doing a series Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development 101 that may be of interest.
[ update, thanks to @Wyck contribution, a list of helper-plugins/boilerplates/frameworks ]
Plugin scbFramework, by @scribu:
A set of useful classes for faster plugin development.
This is a plugin toolkit that helps developers write plugins faster. It consists of several classes which handle common tasks, such as generating settings pages, creating database tables and more.
WordPress-Gear > PHP Boilerplate > Plugin stuff
- Plugin boilerplate by @tommcfarlin
- Object Oriented Plugin Template
- Settings framework by @gilbitron
- scbFramework – Classes for plugin dev
- WordPress Settings API – by @tareq_cse
- WP MVC – MVC framework to create plugins
