Book Image

WordPress Web Application Development

By : Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Web Application Development

By: Rakhitha Nimesh 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 (18 chapters)
WordPress Web Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


The open source nature of WordPress has improved developer engagement to customize and improve existing features by developing plugins, and contributing to the core framework. Inside the core framework, we can find dozens of popular open source libraries and plugins. We planned this chapter to understand the usage of trending open source libraries within the core.

First, we looked at the open source libraries inside the core. Backbone.js and Underscore.js are trending as popular libraries for web development and hence have been included in the latest WordPress version. Throughout this chapter, we looked at the use of Backbone.js inside WordPress, while building the developer profile page of the portfolio application. We looked into Backbone.js concepts such as models, collections, validation, views, and events.

Later on, we looked at the usage of existing PHP libraries within WordPress by using PHPMailer to build a custom e-mail sending interface. In web applications, developers don...