Recently I walked folks through building a simple WordPress plugin from scratch at the WordPress Developers meetup in Fresno (my hometown).

We went through how to build a plugin for taking donations, optionally with a Stripe Checkout overlay.

Here’s the source code.

Learning Resources

As promised, here’s a list of resources to get you started with plugin development.

• https://developer.wordpress.org/ – Recently updated. Great code reference for looking up core WP functions, actions, filters, etc.
• http://wpseek.com/ – The other code reference for quick core WP lookups.
• http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Coding_Standards – Try to adhere to these as much as possible.
• https://pippinsplugins.com/learn/ – A ton of tutorials, code samples, videos, etc. I highly recommend his member-only site.
• https://tommcfarlin.com/ – Another great WP developer to learn from.
• http://wpsessions.com/ – Top notch lengthier video courses.
• http://wordpress.tv/ – Tons of WordCamp video presentations found here for free.
• http://code.tutsplus.com/categories/wordpress – A wide variety of WP dev topics.
• http://applyfilters.fm/ – My favorite WP dev podcast.
• http://wpdevtable.com/ – My 2nd favorite.

Developer Tools

Here’s a few tools I use as I’m developing and debugging plugins.

• https://github.com/manovotny/wptest – Populate your WP install with a ton of posts, pages and media using all aspects of the core WP features. It’s a great way to check how well your plugin works with everything built into WP.
• https://github.com/tommcfarlin/WordPress-Plugin-Boilerplate – For larger plugins this is a great boilerplate to follow to keep your code and files well organized and standardized.
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/developer/ – A collection of 10 useful developer plugins by Automattic.
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/sysinfo/ – See all details about your WP install, PHP, MySQL, etc. Great to install on customer sites to see what they’re using.
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/ – All details about all database queries.

GCE Version 2.0 to be Released late August September 2014

Please submit any questions or troubleshooting requests in the public support forms

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If you haven’t used Stripe for accepting payments online yet, you’re missing out on the best. Hands down.

They take care of payment processing with minimal headaches and extensive developer resources. But they also have a beautiful checkout form you can start using right away on your site.

Stripe Checkout was recently revamped with mobile optimizations and a high conversion form layout that’s gone through probably millions of A/B tests. See the demo for yourself.

Since it’s an embedded button that pops up a checkout form overlay provided by Stripe, you get all their improvements and optimizations automatically as they test and iterate.

It’s pretty simple to add HTML code and the JavaScript reference to any site, but in case you don’t want to bother with that, Nick Young and I created a simple Stripe Checkout plugin for WordPress.

It’s free in the WordPress repository, or simply search for “Stripe checkout” in your WordPress admin.

But wait…aren’t there a ton of good Stripe plugins already out there.

The simple answer is yes. And there are some good ones. If you want to integrate with plugins for e-commerce, membership sites, form building, etc., this plugin is not what you’re looking for. If you’re using one of these, you can probably find a Stripe add-on designed for it.

This Stripe plugin also does not store any post meta for transactions or send emails. Stripe does this for you, though you have to explicitly enable customer receipts.

Note that Stripe suggests that the pages hosting the checkout form be SSL (start with https://).

For version 1.0, there’s just a few settings to enter, then you place a shortcode on your pages where you want the button and overlay. That’s it.

At this point, like our Gumroad WordPress plugin, we’d like to hear from actual users what features they need.

Let us know your feature requests and they might get in a future update.

Update April 24, 2014

Added a few more shortcode options: multiple currencies, billing/shipping addresses, redirect URL, etc. See the changelog.