Edwin, since you're an experienced programmer it will not take you long to put together a plugin and get up to speed in php. I would recommend downloading a few plugins and simple study their code - most are straight up php. There are also courses specifically for creating plug in - Robert Plank has a good one though it is kind of pricy. I'm sure you'll find plenty of sample code via Google and Bing as well. Plus many sites will provide sample code to access their API systems - like Amazon, Paypal and Google.
Good luck!
--Jack

PHP is pretty much the same as C++, JAVA, C# etc. Same kind of OOP language only it's primarily used online. It also uses a lot of the same syntax.

WordPress has quite good resources. codex (dot) wordpress (dot) org.

As far as CSS goes, it's pretty darn simple and you don't need to know much of anything of it anything you need to know can be simply looked up at w3schools (dot) com

If you know how to use HTML then CSS isn't a far reach at all, it's got very similar variables.

Also I suggest looking at the plugin called "Hello Dolly" it comes per-installed (at least it used to up until recently) on all WordPress installations. This is just a very simple plugin that displays quotes on the admin side.

Then I would look at other automation software and figure out what they are doing and expand or collapse on it, using their code samples but definitely check out "Hello Dolly" first, if you can't figure out how it works then you're not going to figure out automation.

I'm pretty sure WPRobot has a free (no modules) download.... I might be wrong. But this might be a good start, otherwise there's some good WSO's that do similar things perhaps it would be in your best interest to pick one of these up for $17 and have a look at how it does things.

Goodluck and if you need alpha tester pm me!

This would be a good start. Plenty of useful tutorials.

Steve

[DELETED]

Small Plugin can be concluded in about a week but the larger ones (WordPress SEO by Yoast) may take weeks and months. Good luck

Hey Edwin,

The main thing about programming in WP is understanding the framework and API in addition to PHP. If you have all that down (and jquery too) you can knock a plugin out in a couple days depending on what it does.

Since you know C# you'll probably pick up PHP in a few days. After that the challenge will be the framework. Unfortunately, the wp codex only has very basic stuff and the books out there on plugin dev are not that great. Still, these are better resources than nothing at all and you're going to need them for reference. Most of your learning is going to come by trying stuff on your own and seeing if you can get it to work, at least that's how it was for me.

If you make backend plugins you many not need to deal with CSS and just use WP's built in admin styles.

You may need to know some Jquery basics. Fortunately the jquery community is great and there's a lot of help out there.

You can shortcut the process by buying plugin code, I do that a lot because I'm so busy. In this case you can get away with knowing less. For personal use that would be ok, but if you're planning on selling your plugins be prepared to dive in to code to fix bugs!

1week to learn PHP ?

If you are good in PHP, it'll be relatively easy to create a Wordpress plugin.

Any tutorials guys?

I got the basic concept down but actions and filters are messing me up a little bit.

Biggest issue for me when writing a WordPress plugin is getting myself to want to do it. Creating plugins is very repetitious, and boring as all hell in my opinion. After you make a few of them, you will be begging to go back to larger scale applications. At least that is how I feel. Even though I still write the things, it isn't enjoyable at all to me.

Most of them I write just to make it quick for people that I might be outsourcing to. If I want to do many of the things I may have hacked together on a site somewhere. I will mess around on a normal site and then see the results from using what I did, and want to scale it, I often turn it into a plugin. Just because I can pay people to setup a bunch of blogs exactly how I want them. Then they just install my plugin for a certain functionality I want on the sites.

I have so many plugins I have written that I kept only for myself. Mainly because I didn't feel like explaining their purpose, or just didn't want others using the techniques, etc.

It's nice to have the ability to make one if you want. But I still find them extremely annoying to create. I couldn't pop them out 2 a week like some people do. Would drive me nuts.

I guess it depends on what you are wanting to create them for. Good business in making cool plugins. They do sell well.

If you are good with C# though, PHP will actually be annoying to you I bet. It isn't as strict as C#. So may C# people, get aggravated with it's laziness, I guess you could call it lol.

One person mentioned the OOP aspect of PHP. I don't know that I would consider PHP an OOP language. You can definitely code it in that way. But that doesn't make it truly an OOP language. Many frameworks, etc, out there push it more towards being OOP. But it just depends on what you are writing and how you are writing it, for how far the OOP comes into play with PHP.

Yeah I think I'll stop with wordpress development. I didnt know it required you to know a lot of HTML and CSS, plus it has a pretty steep learning curve IMHO.

C# is better.

And yes, I hate how un-strict (is that a word?) PHP is. I wanna declare a string and an integer but a variable is pretty much both of those so its get annoying sometimes.