Making the leap to writing your own WordPress plugin can seem impossible, but you can make it easy! In this talk, I’ll show you how to write the simplest possible WordPress plugin. The plugin won’t be able do much, but after writing it you will. You’ll learn how to add your own javascript, css, and php while making sure that all the code you write works correctly with WordPress and any other plugins you run.

The truth is that working with WordPress plugins opens up a new universe of creativity and it’s easy to feel a little overwhelmed by it. Some of the best plugins can have thousands of lines of code and might even interact with several web services. If that’s what a plugin needs to be, how could anyone ever get started? The solution is to figure out a Minimum Viable Plugin and start learning by creating the smallest plugin we can get away with.

You’ll be surprised how far you can go just by writing simple plugins, too. Sometimes, you just want to slightly tweak the functionality of WordPress, or even another plugin, and a simple plugin will get the job done. We’ll look at a few other small plugins I’ve written that make the WordPress sites they run on a little friendlier or just work better.

And, after you’ve built the simplest possible plugin, you can try developing the second simplest possible plugin on your own. We’ll talk about a few ideas you might like to try next. And once you’ve made a few simple plugins, you’ll find yourself making plugins that might have seemed to hard to even begin before. There’s a while lot of plugin development to do after you make the simplest possible plugin, but it’s an excellent way to get started.