As one of the most popular open source content management systems available today, WordPress boasts a framework that allows you to easily customize and extend it through plugins. This comprehensive book shows you how plugins work, reviews the tools and APIs available in WordPress, and demonstrates how to extend the functionality of WordPress with plugins.The trio of established authors provides a practical, solutions-based approach along with a collection of timely examples and plenty of code, all aimed at clearly explaining how to create a plugin file, work with users, integrate widgets, add menus and submenus, secure your plugins, and more. You will quickly come to understand how to develop custom plugins so that you can take WordPress to the next corporate and enterprise level.Professional WordPress Plugin Development: Details the range of complexity in plugins, from a very simple plugin to an extremely elaborate social network package Addresses how to integrate into WordPress, save settings, create widgets and shortcodes, and implement uninstall Learn the proper techniques for storing data, customizing user roles, and security best practices Shares techniques for using custom post types and creating and using custom taxonomies How to create plugins for WordPress Multisite networks Integrate user and role management Explores the HTTP API, JavaScript and AJAX, Cron, the Rewrite API, and more