The problem I have with WP development is that the how-to guides don’t seem to tell you what the file structure should be or which files you’re to add all this wonderful code they list to.
I decided I’d use an off-the-shelf template to start with. This would mean that once I’d changed all the names as appropriate, following the template’s pattern of plugin_name versus plugin-name, I’d be starting at a point where I could activate and deactivate the plugin. I’d have a blank canvas on which to develop to my heart’s content.
So I forked WordPress Plugin Boilerplate from GitHub, which seemed to do the trick.