Developing a wordpress template generation through a plugin

Question

I am developing a wordpress plugin which generates a team page. So i need to add a template page team.php. Can the process be automated independent of the theme, or the user have to be urged for copying the file manually to the templates directory.

Answer 1

You shouldn't need to copy the page like that. Ask the user to create a normal page with only a shortcode in it which you can replace with you content.

That's the standard way to do these things. This page will tell you how to do it : http://codex.wordpress.org/Shortcode_API

Example :

//In your functions.php file
function create_team_page($atts, $content = null){
    //$team_data = generate data here 
    return $team_data;
}
add_shortcode('team_page', 'create_team_page');

The user would simply create a new page with wordpress and put the shortcode [team_data] in the contents. Your hook would replace it with content.