When you start building big plugins, you will likely run into questions about how you should best store the data for your plugin. WordPress makes storing data in the database exceptionally simple through various APIs but sometimes the structure of your data does not fit within the schema if an existing WordPress database.

This tutorial series will walk you through the process of creating custom database tables and building an API to make interacting with the database easy.

We will start by looking at some of the reasons you should consider using custom database tables, then we will move on to how to create those tables, followed by several separate parts about inserting, updating, retrieving, and deleting data in the tables. We will also touch on other important topics such as caching and security.