Building a basic WooCommerce plugin

To get started, we want to build a plugin that will run when WooCommerce is activated on a site. If WooCommerce is not active, we don’t want our plugin to run, because that’s a waste of processing power.

We’re going to create a plugin and then we’ll configure it to only load when WooCommerce is active. We need to start by creating a plugin file.

Creating a plugin

To get started, we need to create the plugin files. Plugins are typically stored in the WordPress filesystem under wp-content/plugins/{your-plugin}.

There are two ways of creating plugin files:

• Use a single plugin file that contains the entire plugin
• Use a folder with multiple plugin files

The vast majority of plugins use multiple files, so we’re going to create a folder for our plugin. Follow the steps given here:

1. Under /wp-content/plugins/, add a folder for your plugin. I’m going to call mine woocommerce-example...