If you’re ready to learn more about WordPress plugin development and continue your journey, you can be glad that there’s a lot more great resources out there.

In this final post of the series, we’ll take a look at a few carefully selected high-quality resources for learning more and then explore some of the best plugins from the repository.

Essential Wordpress Plugin Development Resources, Tutorials and Guides

This excellent roundup by SpeckyBoy is the kind of high-quality collection that have earned list posts their high standing. In fact, it’s so thorough that there’s not much room left for expansion – they’ve got cheatsheets, video tutorials, articles, WP Plugin API links and a collection of the best plugin tutorials so far. If you haven’t read this one yet, you should.

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide

This is actually a book published by Packt Publishing, and I highly recommend it. Before you ask, I do not have an affiliate relationship of any kind with Packt, it’s just a darn good book. Vladimir walks readers through the development of 6 real world plugins that are actually in use by thousands of users, and by the end you will definitely have learned something new about WordPress plugins!

A Novice Guide to WordPress Plugin Development

This post, written by Saad Bassi on Pro Blog Design back in December, is very good if you’re just stepping into WordPress plugins and don’t understand anything yet. It also includes a great list of plugin development resources at the end.

WordPress Codex

Of course, I can’t leave this out because the official API is always the best place to go because it’s official and it’s 100% up to date. WordPress helps you get started with their easy to understand explanation on the basics of Writing a Plugin, after which you can move on to browse the API and discover what’s truly possible with WordPress.

Existing Plugins

You can learn a lot just from studying the excellent plugins that other developers have written. Plus, it’s helpful to know what’s out there before you start working on your own. Here are some excellent roundups of the very best plugins:

• 101 Killer WordPress Plugins to Meet Anyone’s Needs
• 40 WordPress Plugins to Improve the Comment Section
• 32 Extremely Useful Twitter Plugins for WordPress
• 31 WordPress CMS Plugins
• 30 WordPress Plugins to Help Your Improve Your Sidebar
• Top 25+ WordPress Spam Protection and Management Plugins
• 20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins
• 20 Best WordPress Plugins to Enhance Readability
• 17 Useful WordPress Statistics Plugins
• Create a Community Blog with 10 WordPress Plugins
• 12 Essential Plugins that Extend WordPress as a CMS
• 12 Useful Facebook WordPress Plugins for Bloggers
• 10+ WordPress Plugins for Developers
• 10 Most Downloaded WordPress Plugins of All Time
• 5 Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast

Wrapping Up

WordPress plugins are a very enjoyable topic. Besides being incredibly useful, the exploding WordPress market provides lots of opportunties for making money as a Wordpress developer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a commercial plugins market pop up in the next couple years, similar to what’ve we seen with premium themes.

If you haven’t already, take some time to read the tutorials in parts 1-4 of this series:

• Getting Started
• Admin Pages, Widgets & Options
• Write Post Hacks, Shortcodes & TinyMCE
• A Real Life Example

May you get lots of satisfaction and many hours of productivity from WordPress plugin development!