Okay. I’ve worked on making a WordPress plugin once. It’s pretty easy to make a plugin which replaces a tag such as [another-plugin-tag parameter="value"] with some sort of other HTML code. For instance it’s pretty straight forward to replace [iframe http://www.google.com/ 800 600] with an iframe tag.

Something I’ve found difficult to find however is how you can create custom pages as soon as the plugin is activated, which are accessible using a permalink such as http://www.wordpress-site.com/myplugin/search/ which can submit a form to another URL such as http://www.wordpress-site.com/myplugin/results/ and then provide the results with a URL such as http://www.wordpress-site.com/myplugin/results/id/3/ or anything else pretty like that.

And I’m not talking about searching for posts or pages or anything. I’m talking about extending WordPress to have functionality which is not blog related, while still being a plugin.

I installed the ‘Contact Form 7′ plugin to see how it submitted the form, and then I realized it uses Ajax. Great. I don’t want Ajax.

A Hint of a Solution

I searched online looking for something to explain this, because certainly someone else must have been scratching their head like I have. No guides seemed to explain this to me. I’d search for ‘WordPress plugin permalinks’ and I’d only find plugins that deal with permalinks somehow (not what I was looking for).

And I was ignoring all the documentation on hooks and filters, because I don’t want to filter normal blog content, or hook to some blog content. But I was mistaken. I do want to hook a function to something. It turns out that WordPress has a number of actions which it goes through when loading a normal page, available by name in the Plugin API Action Reference page.

At some point of the page loading the permalink style URL, which is basically made possible by a mod_rewrite rule which says that any address is processed by index.php. The WordPress system determines if the URL relates to a page or post or something, or otherwise provides a 404 style error. Okay, so if I can somehow tell WordPress – “Yes! There is a /myplugin/ page”, or “Yes! There is a /myplugin/results/” page, then I’ll have one step of my solution finished.

After further researching I found that there is an article on how WordPress processes a request, and it even mentions GET and POST submissions. This was also obviously hard because ‘post’ is the term used to refer to the blog post records, so a search on Google for ‘WordPress post request’ didn’t return something relevant.

To Be Continued

I’m going to continue to investigate how to build the type of plugin which provides custom URL’s, without requiring the existence of pages for these URLs, and also somehow block the creation of pages which use the permalink structure used by the plugin.