Writing One Really Simple WordPress Plugin

I played around for a few days trying to figure out WordPress plugins. While in the end it's a pretty easy process, I wanted to do a really basic tutorial for folks who were just getting started. While the WordPress Codex has some links that are great for figuring out some of the more complex tasks, the real basic stuff can be daunting when your getting started with WordPress and especially PHP (basically a requirement of plugins).

To get started I recommend having or getting a basic knowledge of PHP. It's really, REALLY not that hard to come across. I recommend getting started with a book like Sam's Learn PHP in 24 Hours. It's one of the first PHP books I bought and after reading it I was ready to do most of the basic stuff that will be covered in this first tutorial.

This first plugin is going to be very simple. To keep a theme page from getting over cluttered, we're going to add a small plugin just to add a Google Ad quickly. Instead of several lines of code on our index.php file we'll have only one to call the whole Ad.

Getting Started

If you have some plugin ideas, and if you think you'll be writing plugins to share with others, the first thing you're going to want to do is build a plugin template. This template will be a mostly blank template which holds all the information needed by WordPress to start activate your creation.
plugin template /*
Plugin Name: Plugin Title Here
Plugin URI: Download URI for the plugin
Description: The plugin description
Author: Your name
Version: The version number
Author URI: Your homepage
*/

//Code Starts Here

?>
I've noted everything you need to know above. Just type the following into your favorite text editor, and save it as pluginTemplate.php.

It's important to make sure that the first < of the document, and the last >, are the first and last character respectively.
Once this is done you're set to get started.

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