As you continue writing for WordPress more and more, the level of difficulty and complexity of your plugins will eventually reach far beyond the simple back-end data manipulation, as demonstrated in our beginner’s article. In this installment we’ll cover in-depth: database interaction, Admin Widgets, and Sidebar Widgets. Today’s example will be a custom built “Most Popular by Views” plugin, which creates an admin area widget for us to view, and a sidebar widget for visitors to see.
What it’s Gonna Do?
Before we open our IDE or write any code, you should always write out a list of what features your plugin will and will not have (at least in its initial phase, you can always extend later). For our plugin, “Most Popular By Views,” our primary feature is to display a list of the most popular posts (we’ll say, top 10). Secondly, we’ll also put the list in the admin area as a kind of low-tech analytics. Lastly, we’ll give the developers the option to display it anywhere by making it available as a sidebar widget, and via a simple function.
