Building Web Apps with WordPress

WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. If you have basic PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript experience you can use WordPress to develop fast, scalable, secure, and highly customized web apps, mobile apps, web services, and multisite networks of websites. Along with core WordPress functions and database schema, you’ll learn how to build custom plugins, themes, and services for just about any kind of web or mobile application.

In this updated second edition, Brian Messenlehner and Jason Coleman cover new features and functionality added to WordPress up to version 5.4. All code examples in the book are available on GitHub.

• •  Compare WordPress with traditional app development frameworks
• •  Use themes for views and plugins for backend functionality
• •  Get suggestions for choosing or building WordPress plugins
• •  Register custom post types (CPTs) and taxonomies
• •  Manage user accounts and roles, and access user data
• •  Build asynchronous behaviors with jQuery
• •  Use WordPress to develop mobile apps for iOS and Android
• •  Integrate PHP libraries, external APIs, and web service plugins
• •  Collect payments through ecommerce and membership plugins
• •  Learn how to speed up and scale your WordPress app
• •  Extend the WordPress REST API and create custom endpoints
• •  Learn about WordPress Gutenberg blocks development

  From the Preface

As we write this, WordPress powers 32% of all sites on the internet, and that number is growing. Many developers want to do more with their WordPress sites but feel that they need to jump ship to a more traditional application framework like Ruby on Rails, Symfony, Yii, or Laravel to build “real” web apps. This sentiment is wrong, and we’re here to fix it.
 

Despite starting out as blogging software and currently existing primarily as a content management system, WordPress has grown into a flexible and capable platform for building web apps. This book will show you how to use WordPress as an application framework to build any web app, large or small.

Who This Book Is For

This book will be most useful for WordPress developers looking to work on heavier applications, and PHP developers with some WordPress experience looking for a PHP-based application framework.

Commercial plugin and theme developers, or anyone working on large distributed WordPress projects, will also find the concepts and techniques of this book useful.

If you are a PHP or language-agnostic developer using another framework and jealous of the large library of WordPress plugins and themes, you may be surprised to learn how well WordPress can work as a general application framework.

Reading and applying the lessons in this book could change your work life for the better.

We assume that readers have an intermediate understanding of general PHP programming. You should also have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, and familiarity with MySQL and SQL queries. Basic understanding of JavaScript and jQuery programming will help with Chapter 9 and any related examples

Who This Book Is Not For

This book is not for people who want to learn how to use WordPress as an end user. There will be brief introductions to standard WordPress functionality, but we assume that you have already experienced WordPress from a user’s perspective.
 

This book is not meant for nonprogrammers. While it is possible to build very functional web applications by simply combining and configuring the many plugins available for WordPress, this book is written for developers building their own plugins and themes to power new web apps.
 

This book will not teach you how to program but rather how to program “the WordPress way.”