This week’s text and video Quick Guide shows how to use WordPress’s wp_footer action hook to make changes to your site’s footer—without editing your theme.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem is amazing. It offers us an almost endless variety of functionalities that we can add to our websites with minimal effort.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: WordPress hooks, including action hooks and filter hooks. Hooks are at the core not only of how WordPress plugins work, but nearly all code in the WordPress ecosystem: most WordPress themes use hooks heavily, as does “WordPress core” itself. WordPress hooks are absolutely a must-know topic in WordPress development.

This WordPress plugin development tutorial captures the steps I went through on a real project, including the mistakes I made and how I debugged them.

A lot of people have written about how competitive WordPress has become and how difficult it is to make money with WordPress from products such as themes and plugins. Others believe there’s still plenty to be thankful for in WordPress.

Editor’s note: Today we’re delighted to invite back one of WPShout’s dearest friends: Josh Pollock!

If you’ve ever wanted to offer a WordPress plugin on the open market, you’ll know a lot of questions come right up. “How?” and “Is my code good enough?” and “Will I immediately drown in support tickets?” are just three.

Making a widget to show a random post uses two underlying concepts you need to get familiar with to be good at WordPress development: making use of WP_Query objects, and making widgets. If you’ve not checked them before, check out our Quick Guides which more thoroughly introduce both:

How does a single plugin become the basis of a thriving technology ecosystem? Partly by leveraging the extensibility that WordPress’s event-driven Hooks system makes possible.

This article covers the benefits of the Settings API, how to use it to create admin options pages, and how to keep your sanity despite its oddities.