I’ll be honest: I actually thought I could build a WordPress plugin with ChatGPT in just a couple of hours. Or, at least, that’s what all the YouTube tutorials and Twitter threads led me to believe.
But let me tell you, those stories left out a few crucial details – about 120 hours’ worth of details, to be exact. Yes, that’s how long it actually took me to build the plugin from start to finish: 120 hours!
For context, I didn’t have any prior experience with plugin or WordPress development, but I decided to dive in anyway. And while I loved the challenge, it was a lot harder than I expected. Every step of the way, I hit one roadblock after another, many of which I didn’t even know existed. It was frustrating, but also a huge – huge(!) – learning experience.
Assuming you plan on following in my footsteps, I strongly urge you to read this article in its entirety beforehand. I’m not saying that as some sort of self-promotion. I’m saying it because it will genuinely save you hours – even days – of extra work.
There are so many things that I stumbled across in this process that I had no clue were important until after the fact. Unfortunately, that led to countless revisions of code (filled with lots of frustration) that could have been prevented. By reading this, you won’t have that problem.