How and why I built A WordPress Plugin

About me

Hey there!! Just joined the community, I’m a web developer with a bit over 8 years of experience working remotely, particularly for WordPress, Yii & Laravel. I live in India in one of the largest city name Ahmedabad. It's beautiful place to live in.

The problem I wanted to solve

I've got the idea while building my own blogging platform(http://imyuvii.com). I wanted to display my location on contact me page of my website. It is built using WordPress. As a WordPress user first thing I did search for the right plugin, got many with random unnecessary options. All I wanted to display a single google map with my city location. So than I thought why not to build own plugin so other can benefited from it.

What is A WordPress Plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-google-map/)?

A easy to use Google Map plugin for WordPress to display your business location on map.
Here are the features list:

Address marker based on inserted address ( i.e. New Delhi, India)
5 different colour schemas
User can zoom it to any level
User can set height and width

Tech stack

I've used following tools.
Google map Library
WordPress Core
Titan Framework
PHP, jQuery,

The process of building A WordPress Plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-google-map/)

Initially I've created a static google map using Html, jQuery and Google Map library. Than I started to shaping it up into WordPress plugin. Honestly, I never thought to upload it on WordPress Plugins library. I thought I'll just keep download link on my website and people will download it if needed. Than at the end of the development plugin turned out to be a good one couple of my friends complemented my work. And that make me think to make it WordPress Community plugin.

Challenges I faced

I didn't face much trouble achieving things technically, I was so clear about what I wanted and what technology can help me achieve it. The only problem I face was uploading plugins because I was unaware with the WordPress plugins norms. I thought simply WordPress core will do the trick. But WordPress has really good documented WordPress plugins norms.

Key learnings

I learned the procedure of uploading a WordPress plugin. It helped me revisit the memory with SVN version control.

Tips and advice

While building a plugin keep your eye on WordPress standards. Get help of frameworks like Titan framework. Which will help you build robust settings pages. It allows you more time to focus on your idea.

Final thoughts and next steps

I believe every WordPress developer should write at least on plugin. It helps you how WordPress plugins being built.