Level Up

A collection of resources for WordPress Developers, written and curated by experts

Plugin Development25 resources

Writing Functional Tests for WP-CLI Packages

Functional tests are crucial for WP-CLI packages as they simulate real-world scenarios, test integration with WordPress, and how they behave in a command line environment. In this article, I’ll show… Read more

Matt Shaw

May 9, 2024

WordPress Plugin Development Best Practices: Plugin Templates

WordPress functionality is largely defined by the available plugins, and many clients want functionality that’s best served with a custom plugin. The initial setup is often a tedious affair, with… Read more

Mike Davey

Dec 6, 2022

Best Ways to Encrypt Passwords, Keys, & More with PHP in 2022

A few years ago I attended Laracon EU where Marcus Bointon gave a great talk on Crypto in PHP 7.2. I left the talk having a much greater appreciation for… Read more

Ashley

Sep 29, 2021

5 Ways to Create a WordPress Plugin Settings Page

It’s been a while since I created a new WordPress plugin from scratch, but recently I decided to turn some code that was working just for me into a fully… Read more

Iain Poulson

Feb 18, 2020

Automated API Testing For Your WordPress Site With Codeception

I’ve previously written about how we use Codeception to perform automated testing on our WooCommerce site where we sell our plugins. Automated tests give us peace of mind that our… Read more

Iain Poulson

Dec 31, 2019

The End of Jigoshop? What Happened to The Once-Popular Ecommerce WordPress Plugin

I woke up this morning to an email from an old client from my days as a freelancer building WordPress sites, asking about SCA compliance. I built them an ecommerce… Read more

Iain Poulson

Sep 24, 2019

How to Decrease Your Site Testing Time: Automated Acceptance Testing for WooCommerce

We’ve written before about how we are using automated acceptance testing to test our WordPress plugins which has decreased manual testing time and helped catch bugs before they are released.… Read more

Iain Poulson

Apr 9, 2019

How We Improved Composer Support For Our Premium Plugins Again

Composer is my go-to method of managing free plugins in WordPress sites. However, managing premium plugins is a little more tricky. Last year we introduced full Composer support for our… Read more

Iain Poulson

Mar 19, 2019

How to Make Your MU-Plugins Compatible with Composer (And Why)

We are big advocates of managing dependencies in our projects with the package manager Composer. It’s essential to make sure the same version of dependencies are used in development environments… Read more

Iain Poulson

Feb 26, 2019

An Introduction to WordPress Penetration Testing

Recently I had Tim Nash, the WordPress platform lead at 34SP.com, speak at the local WordPress meetup I help run. It’s the third time Tim has spoken at the meetup,… Read more

Iain Poulson

Nov 20, 2018

How We Built an Email Queue that Can Send 100 Emails Per Second Through Amazon SES

It’s no secret that I’ve been plugging away at WP Offload SES, a new plugin that we’re hoping to launch soon that will make it easier to send your site… Read more

Matt Shaw

Oct 16, 2018

End-to-End Testing with Cypress

This week on the blog we’re going to talk about something I’m a big fan of: testing. Don’t fall asleep juuuust yet. If you’re like me, during development, you probably… Read more

Peter Tasker

Oct 2, 2018

Build a WordPress Plugin with Vue 2

It’s been a while since we’ve played with Vue JS on this blog, so why don’t we take a beginner-focused look at how one might go about building a simple… Read more

Jeff

Jul 10, 2018

How We Create WordPress Plugins: From Idea to Release

How We Create WordPress Plugins: From Idea to Release

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you’ve probably seen some of our tutorials on developing plugins using different technologies like React and Vue. But when not writing… Read more

Matt Shaw

Apr 24, 2018

How We Built Full Composer Support For Our Premium WordPress Plugins

Composer is the dependency manager of choice for PHP. It allows you to declare a list of project dependencies and will install and update them directly from the command line,… Read more

Ashley

Feb 27, 2018

Behind-the-Scenes: How We’re Automating Acceptance Testing

Have you ever had the joy of carrying out acceptance tests? For our team at Delicious Brains, testing our releases, in the past, has been one of the most dreaded… Read more

Ian

Aug 15, 2017

How to Develop a WordPress Plugin Using Webpack 3 & React (Part 1)

This is article 1 of 2 in the series “How to Develop a WordPress Plugin Using Webpack 3” If you’ve been working with JavaScript in the last couple years you’ve… Read more

Peter Tasker

Jul 19, 2017

Deploying WordPress Plugins with Travis CI

Ever since I built my first WordPress plugin, the process of deploying the code to the WordPress.org Subversion repository has been a painful one. With Git as the widespread VCS… Read more

Iain Poulson

Dec 6, 2016

Using Codeception to Automate WordPress Plugin Testing

When the time comes to release a new update to one of our plugins, the Delicious Brains team gets all excited at delivering more features and improvements to our customers,… Read more

Iain Poulson

Apr 5, 2016

WordPress Plugin Review: WP Pusher

WordPress Plugin Review: WP Pusher

While the WordPress core project still uses SVN for version control, it’s pretty safe to say that the vast majority of serious WordPress developers use Git on their own projects.… Read more

Jeff

Jan 26, 2016

The Awkward Addon Pricing Model For WordPress Plugins

The release of WP Offload S3 this year saw our portfolio double in size and, like our flagship product WP Migrate DB Pro, WP Offload S3 comes with addon plugins… Read more

Iain Poulson

Jan 7, 2016

Unit Testing Ajax and API Requests in WordPress Plugins

I am scared of unit testing. There, I’ve said it. Unit testing is one of those practices that I know I should be doing, there are benefits to doing it,… Read more

Iain Poulson

Nov 3, 2015

WordPress Library Review: Extended CPTs

There are a number of introductions to WordPress Custom Post Types (CPT) to be found on the web that show how to create them, both with admin plugins and manually… Read more

Ian

Jun 23, 2015

Struggles Developing a Commercial WordPress Plugin

Building software to sell is a tricky business. It isn’t always as simple as writing code and getting people to buy it. WordPress commercial plugins come with their own set… Read more

Iain Poulson

May 19, 2015