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

Extending a database with custom tables


Default WordPress databases can be extended by any number of custom tables to suit our project requirements. The only thing we have to consider is the creation of custom tables over existing ones. We can think of two major reasons for creating custom tables:

  • Difficulty of matching data with existing tables: In the previous section, we considered real application requirements and matched the data with the existing tables. Unfortunately, it's not practical in all scenarios. Consider a system where the user purchases books from a shopping cart. We need to keep all the payment and order details for tracking purposes, and these records act as the transactions in the system. There is no way that we can find a compatible table for these kinds of requirements. Such requirements will be implemented using a collection of custom tables.

  • Increased data volume: As I mentioned earlier, the posts table plays a major role in web applications. When it comes to large...