Since I am new to WordPress plugin development I have been examining the internal structure of many plugins. I have found that most of them don’t fit any pattern and so understanding how they work can be difficult.
I was wondering if there is more generalized way of plugin development, possibly with a framework, other than the methods described in official documentation.
AFAIK, there’s no official/standard framework, and there will be as many plugin development styles as there are shades of white in north pole.
I’d say WordPress Coding Standards is a blueprint for a good style.
You’ll find lots of good examples and excellent coders here in WPSE. A nice starting point: questions/tagged/plugin-development.
Highlighting:
Nowadays, I use Plugin Class Demo from @toscho as base for many plugins.
Right now, @Pippin is doing a series Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development 101 that may be of interest.
[ update, thanks to @Wyck contribution, a list of helper-plugins/boilerplates/frameworks ]
Plugin scbFramework, by @scribu:
WordPress-Gear > PHP Boilerplate > Plugin stuff
Two more newer frameworks are:
Both share similarities with Laravel.
You can also generate your personalized version of Tom’s Plugin boilerplate here.
I believe Sunrise (http://gndev.info/sunrise/) is the kind of thing you’re asking for. It’s relatively new, and I haven’t used it myself, so I offer no recommendations. However, it looks quite promising. It’s available on WordPress plugin directory as a plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/sunrise/.
You can check this one is very simple and basic base structure. https://github.com/softmixt/simple-wordpress-plugin-framework