How To Build WordPress Plugins With AI in 20 Minutes (No Coding)

Today I'm going to show you step by step how to build a fully functional WordPress plug-in using AI without writing a single line of code. I'll walk you through the exact setup, workflows, and prompts I personally use to build more than 10 plugins in the last few months. If you are ready, let's get started. So step number one is to install LocalWP, a free application that allows you to install WordPress locally. It's great for building and developing plugins, themes, and anything related to WordPress locally. So just click download for free and install the application. It's super simple and you will have it on your PC. When you open the first time, you will not have any website. So just click on this plus icon and create a new WordPress website. Click continue. Then let's call it for example plugin dev one anything and then continue. Just give it a name and a password and then add site. Just wait for a few seconds and you'll have a fully functional WordPress website running locally on your computer. Okay, it's done and running. You can click on this simple button here to install a local SSL. So your local WordPress site will be also secured. And you can turn on oneclick admin. So you can log in directly to the dashboard easily. That's it. Now let's click on WP admin here. And you will see we are inside WordPress, a local WordPress website running on our PC. Perfect. The second step is to install Visual Studio Code. If you are following my videos, you know we always use VS Code. So maybe you have already installed it. in case just download and install and again it's super simple just open it. The third step is to install an AI coding agent inside VS code. If you go into extensions and search for you will see we have code for VS code. This is the one I use and I recommend using it. You can also use Codex from OpenAI if you want this one OpenAI's coding agent or maybe you can use if you prefer client. This extension allows you to code directly with AI choosing the preferred AI model you want. In our case, we're going to go with cloud code for VS Code. It's a great agent for coding almost anything. You will see now the power of code in building plugins for WordPress. Now the last application we want is GitHub. It will help us build automated update for plugins for live websites. You will see this later in this video. So just go here to GitHub Desktop. Search Google and download GitHub Desktop for Windows or Mac depending on your OS and then open GitHub Desktop. I'm skipping installations because it's somehow simple. I don't want to waste your time now. So now we are ready. We have GitHub. We have VS code installed with a clone code inside. And we have our WordPress website running with local WP. We are ready to start building our plug-in. So let me show you the plugin we are going to build together. So this is another sample WordPress website I developed before and you can see we have the testimonials plugin. If you open it, you will see we can add testimonials. For example, click on add. Give it a name, whatever you want. And you can set the number of stars and then paste it here and publish. We have here settings and how to use. For example, we can we have this short code. We can copy it and then go to pages. And you can see here this sample page. I pasted the short code here. And then when you open the page, you'll see we have testimonials published on the front end. Perfect. So this is the plugin we're going to build together. So the next step is to create our project. Please focus very well here. So go back to local WP here and click on site folder. This will open the WordPress folders where the website was installed or the website files. Go here to app and then public then WP content. You see these the WordPress files if you are familiar with WP content. And here we have the plugins. We are going to create the project directly in the plugins folder. And this is very important. So we can update and test directly and see the updates live on our website. So just copy this path and go here to GitHub and click on file new repo or repository. Give it a name. for example, my first WP plugin and make sure to paste the local path you got here in the plugins and create ripple. So now our project is directly inside the plugins folder and this will make our life easier when building the plug-in. You will see right now let's open MS code and now we are inside the plug-in folder. Perfect. Simply click on the code icon here to open the AI coding agent. And we can start now building the plug-in. But before we build, we need to have a live website. So when we finish development, we can push and test online and also test the automatic updates with the live website. Now, if you have a WordPress website running, perfect. You can test with. Now in my case I create a new testing WordPress website. It takes just one second WordPress install and just give it a name for automatic free SSL. Okay, save and deploy. That's it. I'll open it. And perfect. I have my new WordPress website in seconds. If you are wondering what's this, this is called Koolifi and I use it as my software to manage my self-hosted server where I save like $700 every month. Anyway, if you're interested to learn more, I have a full course in self-hosting. I leave a link in description, but it's out of scope for now. Now, we have our local site. You see this one locally and we have the one online. So when we develop, we can test the full workflow, the updates, automatic update, and testing plug-in directly on our live website. Perfect. Let's go back to VS Code and start building our plug-in. We need to make sure we are in the plan mode in VS Code to start planning our plug-in with the AI agent. And of course, we are not going to use AI like 99% of people. I'll tell it build me a WordPress plug-in. Of course not. I will use a prompt like this. I'll go through it in like 1 minute. So first I'm defining the environment and OS. So I'm telling the AI where I'm working like on Windows, on Mac, I'm using a local web server. I'm telling it we are actually now in the plug-in folder. So it knows that. So we are giving more context for the AI to know exactly what to do. Then we have the role your role as a senior WordPress plug-in developer. So I'm telling it your focus on WordPress development. Then I'm telling it how to respond. I want to go step by step. Don't dumb the code all at once. I want a short explanation so I can understand and learn while I'm building. And this is very important. Then we have to follow WordPress coding standards and best practices for security and performance. And then for the text stack, I define how I want the plug-in structure. Don't worry, I give you the prompt by the end of this video. So you just need to copy and paste. But I really recommend and encourage you to read this prompt and understand it step by step and line by line. And you can ask AI about it. This will help you a lot when you want to build your plugins next time. So you have the context, you have the information, so you can prompt and talk to the AI way better than just vibe coding or dummy prompting. Then go down, we have development workflow. I will tell it to start with the folder structure first. Then generate the skeleton of the plug-in and go step by step. For data, I will tell it based on the plug-in idea. Decide whether to use custom post types in WordPress. Then for the front end, I will tell it to use short codes and so on. By the way, this is a generic prompt template you can use with any plugin. It's not just for testimonials. I will give the prompt and you can test with any idea you have in mind. Then we are going to tell it how to build the admin and dashboard section and the settings and configuration and to take care of security and validation. And at the end, I have my plug-in idea. Here you describe your plug-in. So in my case I will call it simple testimonials collector and I set the goal and what I want features. So you describe exactly what you want the admin features data storage and so on and at the end add this simple sentence ask me questions to understand exactly what I want. So the AI code in our case will plan this plugin and then ask you questions to ensure you and the AI are on the same page. Let's run. Perfect. You can see now we have clarifying questions and it's very important to read this, understand them and answer these correctly so that I understand exactly what you want. I will answer these questions fast now to save time. Okay, let's continue planning. Perfect. We have the implementation full plan. As I always mention when you are coding with AI, it's very important to read this plan, to read the AI output, not the code, the planning and the questions and the details the AI shows you. It's very important to read and understand. Even if you are new to this, just read. If you don't understand something, just search it, Google it, learn about it. Enjoy learning while building. I always say this, enjoy learning while building with AI. So you can read the plan. If everything is perfect, you don't have any changes, just say yes and auto accept. And then AI will start building. You can see now we got the to-do list and it will go through them one by one to build our plug-in. And perfect, the plugin is ready. If you go now here to our WordPress website locally, go here to plugins, you will find the plugin. Before I activate and test, I want to mention again something very important. If you want to be successful building real, scalable, profitable projects with AI, you need to understand before building. The first example is to understand the output of the AI. Second and which I believe is the most important is understanding the building blocks of any project you are building. Whether you are building a mobile app, a website, microsass, WordPress plug-in, Chrome extension, anything you want to build, just go and today it's way easier. For example, you can go here to code, set the style to learning and tell it, I want to build a WordPress plug-in with AI. I want to understand the building blocks and the structure of WordPress plugins before I start this simple prompt and go and start like in 30 minutes you can get all the ideas and you will see the mind shift and the way you talk with AI and prompt it will definitely change to get way more powerful results and this is what I'm going to focus on in my solo builder school and building and launching next month I will help anyone go from scratch to launching the first product in 30 days understanding the building blocks of any project they want to build. If you are interested, you can check and join the waiting list in the description below. So, let's go back to our website. I think I talked a lot maybe. So, let's activate. Perfect. Here we have testimonials plugin, all testimonials. And we can simply now add one. Let's say test one. Anything. And you can set here the rating like five stars. Perfect. Let's paste a sample testimonial. Okay. Paste and publish. Publish. Perfect. Let's go back. And perfect. We have testimonial. Let's create a new page. Add page. And I will test the front end. So my testimonial. And I will add a short code here. testimonial. Publish view the page and perfect we have our testimonials showing on the front end. So now we have our WordPress running perfectly tested locally. How we can publish and test online? The basic flow is to go here again to the plugins and just zip this file or this folder. Compress zip file. And now we have the zip file containing the plugin. Go again here to our public WordPress website which is running online. Go to dashboard. Go to plugins. Add a plugin. And then simply go here, upload. Choose file. And let's go to this path and simply select the zip file and install and activate. And we got the testimonials plugin running on our public online website perfectly. But now the problem is if I update this plugin here locally every time I need to go again and zip the file and publish and upload to my website and this is of course not the best to develop and test on a live website. So we need to implement automatic updates. Now the good news is this guy here created the plug-in update checker. It's open source and free on GitHub. We can use this to check for updates automatically using GitHub. Let's go back to VS Code and I will simply paste this prompt. Again, I will give you all the prompts by the end of this video. Just follow up. Now, you can see now I'm telling it I want to add automatic update functionality to my plug-in using plug-in update checker. And this is a great example to what I mentioned before in a few seconds. So, this is one of the building blocks when you are developing WordPress plugins. If you don't know about it, how you need to go and research how to update, how to implement automatic updating and so on. But if you know this, you can just tell the AI use it to implement automatic updates. This is the power of context. This is the power of having background before building anything. So I'm just telling it use this, clone it, and implement automatic updating to my plug-in. Let's run. Let's accept. Again we have a to-dos list and to start working on. Okay. So it's done. You can see here we have testing updates documentation update workflow. You can also read this to understand how this plug-in work and how to implement it. Now the idea is simple. I will go here back to GitHub to my account and go here to settings. Then go down to developer settings. Then go to personal access tokens and then go tokens classic and I will create a token. So we have access to this private GitHub repository. I will call it testing plugin anything update and check ripple and create the token generate. So we have it now. You see again why I'm doing this because now when we push the project to GitHub with GitHub desktop and when you push you will see that on GitHub this project is set to private. So only you have access. So for WordPress to check this project we'll need access. This is why we use a key. Now in the project we have the main plug-in folder here or file sorry the main PHP file. We will go down here and you will see we can set the URL to GitHub and we have the token here. I will paste it and let's get the GitHub URL this one and paste it here. So this way the plugin will check using this URL and access using this token. Perfect. And you will see here we have the version and the version this is what will be used to check for new updates. You will see right now. So the plug-in is ready. We will save and let's publish the new version to our WordPress website which is running online. I will go back to plugins folder and zip the new plugin which has the update feature. So this is my website online. I go to plugins here and I will deactivate and delete this old plugin and let's upload our new plugin that has the update functionality. Install and activate. Perfect. You can see now we have version 1.0.0. Now back to our project. Let's say you did some updates. You added features. All you have to do is change the version in this main file and increment by one like this. Save. Now go here to GitHub and say like updated whatever and push this new update. And now locally on our local website you will see the version will be update automatically because we are developing locally. It will read from the local files. But on our website here you see version is 1.0. If you refresh it is still 1.0. But now we can click on check for updates and you will see automatically it will tell you we have a new version. It reads the new version from GitHub and you can simply update directly from GitHub. Now the full workflow I showed you today is not only for developing plugins. You can even build full microsass and online tools on top of WordPress. For example, you can see here another WordPress website where I built an AI image generator. Cat in a Superman shirt generate with awesome loading. This is fully on top of WordPress. You can use the same concept to build AI tools and whatever you want on top of WordPress. I explain this in detail in my full course WordPress SAS 2.0. 0. If you are interested, you can find it on wbuilderschool.com. Now, for the prompts, simply go here to simpl.com and then go to prompts and you'll find the WordPress plug-in auto updater prompt and the WordPress plug-in development prompt. The full prompts here, you can just copy and test and build your first WordPress plug-in. I know maybe for beginners there's a lot of information here. But if you want to stand out in this AI era, the only path is to learn these skills. At least go and test what we did today. Install WordPress locally, build a simple plug-in, play with it, break it, fix it. This is how you learn and this is how you improve your skills and be successful online. And if you say that's too much for me, I can't build this full project right now. I'm total beginner. You can get started with this video here where we build WordPress plugins and landing pages with AI with an easier approach. So, you can start with this and then come back to this full video and implement it. If you have any questions, I'll be waiting for you in the comments section below. Thank you and see you next