Managing WP Plugin Customisation

One of the great things about WordPress is the plethora of plugins that the user community has developed to extend and enhance the basic blog functionality. Some plugins, such as WP-PluginsUsed, are simple and add a function or two you can embed in a page and are implemented as a single php file. Others, such as Now Reading Reloaded, provide significant functionality and involve many files.

Some plugins are purely for administration of the blog, such as Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu, whereas others provide functionality viewable to your readers. I have found the need to tweak some of these, sometimes for look’n'feel, sometimes for functionality. But managing modified plugins can be a challenge. This article looks at the common areas of customisation and how they can be managed.

Plugins Implementation and Customisation

Lets start by looking at how plugins are implemented and can be customised.

All plugins are installed in your blogs plugins directory and each one has its own directory/folder. For example my plugins are under blog/wp-content/plugins and there are folders for each plugin I’m using. These plugin folders will contain readme files, screenshots, code (.php files) and stylesheets (there may be other files but they’re not important). There may also be a sub-directory/folder for images or other files (such as javascript).

Most plugins implement some functionality by using the supplied WordPress template tags or functions. Some will also perform database (SQL) calls. Many plugins will also provide page templates that display specific content (for example Now Reading Reloaded displays book information) or embeddable functions (for example WP-PluginsUsed provides a [active_pluginsused] function to go into pages). Many also provide CSS code or id/class references in the page templates or embeddable functions.

From a customisation perspective there are three areas I’ve encountered;

1. Stylesheets – this is the most common type of customisation, where the plugin provides CSS id and class tags in the code and a sample CSS file, and you modify the CSS settings to suit your theme.
2. Pages – many plugins provide pages to display content in your blog, and you may need to change the layout of the page or content displayed by modifying the php or html code, or you need to add or modify the CSS id and/or class tags to fit your theme.
3. Functions – where you want to change the functionality provided by the plugin.

I’ll explore customising each of these in the following pages.

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