The first part of this tutorial will explain the components of the most minimal of wordpress plugins, just so you can get the idea of how they work. This tutorial assumes that you know a few basics about PHP and that you’re familiar with how to use wordpress plugins (e.g. you’ve installed, activated, and used other wp plugins before).

Basically, a plugin allows you to define your own functions so that you can call those functions on your wordpress pages and posts. You wordpress plugins are located in your wordpress installation folder under …/wp-content/plugins/PLUGIN.php. The actual plug-in is always a php file.