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  • Book Overview & Buying WordPress Web Application Development
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WordPress Web Application Development

WordPress Web Application Development

By : Ratnayake
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WordPress Web Application Development

WordPress Web Application Development

5 (3)
By: Ratnayake

Overview of this book

Developing WordPress-powered websites is one of the standout trends in the modern web development world. The flexibility and power of the built-in features offered by WordPress has made developers turn their attentions to the possibility of using it as a web development framework. This book will act as a comprehensive resource for building web applications with this amazing framework. "WordPress Web Application Development" is a comprehensive guide focused on incorporating the existing features of WordPress into typical web development. This book is structured towards building a complete web application from scratch. With this book, you will build an application with a modularized structure supported by the latest trending technologies. "Wordpress Web Application Development" provides a comprehensive, practical, and example-based approach for pushing the limits of WordPress for web applications beyond your imagination. This book begins by exploring the role of existing WordPress components and discussing the reasons for choosing WordPress for web application development. As we proceed, more focus will be put into adapting WordPress features into web applications with the help of an informal use-case-based model for discussing the most prominent built-in features. While striving for web development with WordPress, you will also learn about the integration of popular client-side technologies such as Backbone, Underscore, and jQuery, and server-side technologies and techniques such as template engines, RSS feeds, Open Auth integration, and more. After reading this book, you will possess the ability to develop powerful web applications rapidly within limited time frames with the crucial advantage of benefitting low-budget and time-critical projects.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
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12
Index

WordPress as a web development framework

In practice, the decision to choose a development framework depends on the complexity of your application. Developers will tend to go for frameworks in most scenarios. It's important to figure out why we go with frameworks for web development. Here is a list of possible reasons that frameworks become a priority in web application development:

  • They provide stable foundations for building custom functionalities
  • Stable frameworks usually have a large development community with active support
  • Frameworks contain built-in modules to address the common aspects of application development such as routing, language support, form validation, user management, and more
  • They have a large number of utility functions to address repetitive tasks

Full stack development frameworks such as Zend, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP adhere to the points mentioned in the preceding section, which in turn become the framework of choice for most developers. Now let's take a look at how WordPress fits into the boots of the web application framework.

MVC versus event-driven architecture

A vast majority of web development frameworks are built to work with the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, where the application is separated into independent layers called models, views, and controllers. In MVC, we have a clear understanding of what goes where and when each of the layers will be integrated in the process.

So, the first thing most developers will look at is the availability of MVC in WordPress. Unfortunately WordPress is not built on top of the MVC architecture. This is one of the main reasons that developers refuse to choose it as a development framework. Even though it is not MVC, we can create a custom execution process to make it work like an MVC application. Unlike other frameworks, it won't have the full capabilities of MVC. But unavailability of an MVC architecture doesn't mean that we cannot develop quality applications with WordPress.

WordPress relies on procedural event-driven architecture with its action hooks and filter system. Once the user makes a request, these actions will get executed in a certain order to provide the response to the user. You can find the complete execution procedure at http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference.

In an event-driven architecture, both the model and controller code gets scattered throughout the theme files. In the upcoming chapters, we are going to look at how we can separate these concerns with the event-driven architecture, in order to develop maintainable applications.

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