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Structure of a WordPress Plugin

Are you writing your first WordPress plugin? One way of the best ways to learn how is to read other plugins’ code; most of which you need to do has probably been written by someone else before. You can also use this code generator that produces a template for your WordPress plugin, which you can fill with your code and distribute to the community.

But why would you want to write a WordPress plugin? There are enough reasons to get you started, not to mention that it’s fun and quite easy to do with all the resources available.

jQuery 1.1.3.1: Faster yet still without the fats

The jQuery developers have just released an update, version 1.1.3.1, which it claims to have significant speed improvements over the previous one. With several bug fixes and improvements, the package is reportedly 800% faster than before, a huge performance jump if their metrics are indeed accurate.

jQuery has slowly grown in adoption rate as more projects are now considering it as an alternative to Prototype, an equally powerful Javascript library. With point releases that come often and significant improvements, the package is now becoming a common part of most open source projects, perhaps attributed to its ease of use compared to other libraries.

Zend Framework 1.0 now available!

Earlier this month, Zend has released version 1.0 of their Zend Framework, their first production release. Some of the notable features of this robust development framework:

  • Powerful MVC framework
  • Database access solution that balances ORM with efficiency and simplicity
  • Lucene-compatible search engine
  • Advanced I18N support
  • Robust authentication/authorization classes and input filtering
  • Rich web services client interfaces, including Google Data APIs and StrikeIron
  • Many other useful classes to make you as productive as possible
  • Thorough and high-quality test suites and documentation
  • Open-source development process with an active community provides continuous review and testing

Claiming to be the best suited PHP5 framework for meeting business needs, ZF should make significant headway into widespread use considering it can leverage its direct link to PHP itself, similarly a product attributed to Zend itself. The question though is will ZF be able to eat into the Ruby on Rails crowd?