WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Understanding the Includes

When you activate a plugin, the name of the file containing the information header is stored in the WordPress database. Each time a page is requested, WordPress goes through a laundry list of PHP files it needs to load, so activating a plugin ensures that your own files are on that list. To help illustrate this concept, let's break WordPress again.

Exercise – parse errors

Try the following exercise:

1. Ensure that the "Hello Dolly" plugin is active.
2. Open the /wp-content/plugins/hello.php file in your text editor.
3. Immediately before the line that contains function hello_dolly_get_lyric, type in some gibberish text, such as "asdfasdf" and save the file.
4. Reload the plugins page in your browser.
5. This should generate a parse error, ...