Find and Install WordPress Plugins through Github

WordPress plugins are “officially” distributed through the WordPress-owned plugin repository. You can search for any kind of plugin to add extra functionalities to your website or blog. But, there are also a number of great plugins that we can find outside that are not hosted in the official repo.

Some plugins can only be found in its developer website, while some can only be found in Github.

Github is like a gold mine for developers. There are a bunch cool projects including WordPress plugins that are hosted in it. But sadly Github does not return quite an accurate result when we search for WordPress plugins. Using keywords like “WordPress Plugins” does not help much either. But here is what you can do with a plugin.

Github Plugin Search

Github Plugin Search is a plugin created by Paul Clark. This plugin, as the name implies, allows you to search and install WordPress plugins from Github. To do the job, this plugin utilizes Github API Search, Plugin File Header and WordPress Installer API.

Once installed, you can search and add new Plugins from Plugins > Add New menu as usual. But as this plugin is still undergoing development, it replaces the Plugins search result entirely with a list of plugins found in Github.

In this example below, I searched for “bootstrap”. And it returns several results.

Word Of Caution

This plugin could be a good alternative source to find WordPress plugins. But there is one important thing to note when you are using it:

Github is not designed specifically to distribute WordPress plugins. Unlike WordPress.org repo, which moderates all the submitted plugins, Github allows anyone to upload and host their project in it without strict screening. This could be taken advantage of by people who upload plugins with malicious codes, which for intance could allow backdoor access to your blog without your permission.

So, while this Github is a great alternate source to find WordPress plugins, you have to be cautious with your choices. Make sure that you know what the plugin and the codes in it do before getting the plugin.

Final Thought

I’m looking forward to the enhancements of this plugin. In the future, the developer, plans to add the capability to let you opt between WordPress.org repo and Github.

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How to Create WordPress Custom Fields The Easy Way

WordPress provides the essential fields that allow us to publish posts and pages. A few of these fields include the Content Editor, Category Options, Tags, and Featured Image.

These fields, however, are not sufficient to accommodate certain cases. Let’s say you build a Book Listing site that will show the book author, the ISBN number, and the publisher. You will need some extra fields to input the extra information.

Luckily, WordPress is now quite extensive, it gives developers the ability to create custom fields to cater to any website needs. These custom fields could be a general text input, a textarea, a dropdown option, a color picker, calendar, and even an image uploader. In this tutorial, we show you how to create WordPress custom fields the easy way. Let’s get started.

Recommended Reading: WordPress Date Query

Advanced Custom Fields

To give you a real example, let’s try building a book listing site. To create our custom fields easily, we will use a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields by Elliot Condon. With it, we won’t need to touch the code too much for creating the custom fields. However, some code-level editing in the theme files is required to display the data that we have entered into the fields.

Once we have installed it, it adds a new side-menu called Custom Fields. Go to this menu, click on the Add New button, and name the Fields Group. For example, "Custom Settings" (see shot).

Click on the + Add Field to create a new custom field, and we name the field label as Author. Below it, set the Field Name simply as book_author, which we will use to call out or display the data of Book Author. You may also set Field Instruction, and the Placeholder Text, but those are optional.

Then, we can create a set of other fields as in Page Length, the Publisher, and Book Language like so.

Next, we need to assign the field group to display it in a particular Post Type. You can assign it with Post, Page, Page Template, Attachment, or set rules that involve several Post Types altogether. In the following example, I would like to display the fields to Book Post Type, which you can easily create on your own with this handy tool, GenerateWP.

Then we head over to our Book Post Type editing screen, and fill it up.

Displaying the Data

Before proceeding, since we assigned the fields to Custom Post Type, we need to create a new file to display the content called single-book.php (have a look at this page for reference). We will also put our codes in this file.

Once all our custom fields have been populated, we will display them in the front-end by using the_field() function followed by the field name. For example, this code below displays the data from the Author Book field that we’ve created above.

the_field('book_author')

It’s really that easy. Furthermore, if you want to make sure that it should only be displayed when the data is present, you can wrap the code with a conditional statement. For example:

if( !empty(the_field('book_author')) ) :  the_field('book_author');endif;

And below you will find all the codes that we put in single-book.php to display our book.

<div class="entry-content"> <?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {  echo '<figure class="book-thumbnail">'; the_post_thumbnail('book-thumbnail'); }  echo '</figure>';?><div class="book-info"> <h3 class="book-title"><?php the_title() ?></h3> <p class="book-description"><?php the_content() ?></p> <h4 class="book-details-title">Book Details</h4> <div class="book-details"> <ul> <li class="book-author"><span class="label">Author:</span> <?php the_field('book_author') ;?></li> <li class="book-pub"><span class="label">Publisher:</span> <?php the_field('book_publisher') ;?></li> <li class="book-pages"><span class="label">Length:</span> <?php the_field('book_pages') ;?></li> <li class="book-lang"><span class="label">Language:</span> <?php the_field('book_language') ;?></li> <li class="book-pubid"><span class="label">ISBN/ASIN:</span> <?php the_field('book_isbn_asin') ;?></li> </ul> </div></div></div>

With a little bit of styling with CSS, we can achieve the following neat and subtle result.

Final Thought

In this tutorial, we’ve shown you the very basic example of using Advanced Custom Fields plugin to create your own a set of new Text fields and assign them to a Custom Post Type easily.

Apart from that, this plugin provides a number of custom fields to enhance our website including WYSIWYG Editor, TextArea, Dropdown, User List Options, Google Maps, and many more. You can explore the plugin further and see what cool things you can come up with.

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