How I developed my very first custom WordPress plugin

Why?

It all started in mid-January 2024 when I wanted to display an availability calendar for a website hosted on WordPress. At the time, I didn’t realize that I was going to create a real WordPress plugin for this.

I’d snooped around WordPress development before and looked at articles and books on the subject, but never came up with a working custom plugin. This should now change.

Since I needed a quick solution to the problem, I created a new directory on the domain and worked out a calendar as quickly as possible that would display the blocked days and then integrate it with an “iframe” element on WordPress. Later, when I wanted to change the look and feel of the calendar, it turned out that this method was impractical, unprofessional and simply unusable in the long term.

The cursed calendar gave me no peace and I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t solve my problem properly.

My first WordPress plugin

After hours of research and days of poking around, I finally managed to create a simple plugin for WordPress.

Well, the extension couldn’t do anything at the time. You could only activate and deactivate it, but still there was a sens of satisfaction to it when playing around. This gave me the motivation to continue with the development.

Over time, I got so far with the extension that I uploaded it to GitHub. I plan publishing it soon too, but the source code is a disaster and needs a lot of work. When I’m ready, I’ll update this post and publish the full source code.

Hello BookMe?!

BookMe; the ill-considered name of my very first WordPress extension. Why ill-considered? Well, after days of coding, I realized that this name doesn’t fit the plugin at all. This means that at some point every single name in the code must be replaced. As of today, the name appears 228 times.

Nevertheless, the basic structure of my plugin is in place and I am proud to present it soon.