The main concepts behind the Wall plugin

Before we start with our plugin, let's take a moment and create a design outline covering the main areas of the plugin.

The main development concerns here are the management of comments, and spam protection.

A typical PHP approach to address these concerns would be:

It is obvious that this approach needs a long development time. On the other hand, this is a book about WordPress, which is arguably the best blogging platform in the world today. Blogging includes a lot of commenting, and WordPress already features one of the most advanced commenting engines available. So why just not take advantage of it?

The main principle behind our idea is to dedicate a WordPress page as a place holder for all user comments. This allows us to use the WordPress commenting engine to take care of most of the hard work, such as adding the comments, administrative management and best of all—spam protection.

WordPress already comes with built-in comment spam and flood protection.

There are also a number of popular anti-spam plugins such as Akismet that deal with the problem of spam in the comments. So instead of reinventing the wheel, we will leave these dedicated plugins to do the job.

By using built-in WordPress functionalities whenever we can, we also provide the opportunity for the plugin to develop itself automatically with the development of WordPress. For example, if the next version of WordPress brings comment editing in a super cool 3D way, all comments for our widget will become editable in the same way automatically.

This will allow us to spend more time focusing on other areas of the widget—like deciding which jQuery effects we can use to make it more attractive.