WordPress plugins consist of one or more PHP files, which reside in the user’s wp-content/plugins directory. In these PHP files is where you will utilize the WordPress Plugin API.

A WordPress plugin must start with some “header” information. This is to tell WordPress the name, description and author of the plugin. Without this information, your plugin will not show up on the user’s plugin page and will not be able to be activated. This header information looks like this (this should go right after your opening <?php statement):

[code='php']/*
Plugin Name: Comment Approval Notification
Plugin URI: http://mattsblog.ca/plugins/comment-approval-notification/
Description: Sample Description.
Version: 1.1.1
Author: Matt Freedman
Author URI: http://mattsblog.ca/
*/[/code]

This example is taken straight from one of my plugins, Comment Approval Notification. This header information is simply a multi-line PHP comment, formatted in a special way. Here’s a breakdown:

Plugin Name – This is where you put the name of your plugin that you would like to have show on the Plugins page.

Plugin URI – This is where you can add a URL where more information can be found about your plugin. This parameter is optional.

Description – This is where you add a short description of what your plugin does. Keep it brief, you can always explain more in-depth on your plugin’s URL.

Version – This is the version of your plugin. Whenever you make changes to your plugin, and release them to the public, you should increment your version. Most plugin developers use the “standard” major.minor.bugfix version scheme, but you can use any versioning scheme you’d like.

Author – This should contain the names of the developer(s) who worked on this plugin.

Author URI – This is where you can add your site’s URL. This parameter is optional.

Note: If you have multiple authors and want to have links to their separate sites on the Plugins page, you can omit the Author URI parameter and format the Author parameter using HTML to link to each author, like this:

Author: Matt Freedman and Gary Jones

In Closing

I know this wasn’t a very exciting post, but the header information is an integral part of any plugin.