After discussion with a few people, and looking through some material that’s been sent to me, I’m thinking it may be better to separate the theme/plugin development handbooks out from the other, more contributor- focused handbooks. This will let us get a greater level of detail into the theme/plugin dev handbooks. However, I would still like maintain consistency across these two handbooks. Both Chip and Brad sent me through some ideas, and by looking through both of them, I came up with this loose structure that I think we can fit things into.
Introduction
Tools
Part 1: The Basics (how themes/plugins work)
Part 2: Requirements (what you must include in your plugin/theme)
Part 3: Functionality (different functionality available to you and how to implement it – should include working examples)
Part 4: Settings & Options (creating and using options, the settings API)
Part 5: Security (how to stay secure, data validation)
Part 6: Best Practices (UI, UX, Accessibility, general best practices)
Part 7: Releasing your Plugin/Theme on WordPress.org
Part 8: Glossary
If you’re planning to work on the plugin or theme development handbooks I’d appreciate if you could just let me know what you think of that schema, and tell me whether there is anything that you think won’t fit into those chapters.
The other thing to note, is that these two handbooks will take much longer than the shorter contributor handbooks to complete. I’m going to publish a timeframe and dates later this week, and we’ll plan for a longer time frame on these two.
Let me know what you guys think.