This chapter ties together several of the core concepts from previous chapters, while investigating WordPress’ capabilities as a CMS. It also covers a few extra tricks, including shortcodes, creating a link to your plugin’s settings page, and how to clean up when someone uninstalls your plugin. The task before us is to tap into WordPress’ CMS abilities by using the register_post_type() function. Judging by the diffiulties tracked in the SVN repository
as WordPress 3.1 got ready for launch, it seems that we weren’t the only ones who experienced diffiulties in wrestling with WordPress’ CMS capabilities. A word of warning: this function is diffiult to use and lacks good documentation,
and exploring its full capabilities is beyond the scope of this chapter. If you want to examine a fuller implementation of custom post types and what they can do, have a look at one of our plugins (http://goo.gl/cgJDU)—this is the plugin we wrote for early drafts of this chapter, but the code quickly grew too complex for educational purposes. Our aim here is to demonstrate one use case of the register_post_type() function, so you can see how it works. We want a plugin that allows users to create their own reusable chunks of content that we can reference in other posts
via WordPress shortcodes, denoted by square brackets, for example, [exampleshortcode] . This is a great way to reuse content across many posts or pages.