WordPress for Applications

Subtitles – I like them

Who are we?

• Mat & Vincent, from Rocketmen• No, we don’t build Rockets• We develop custom and complex digital solutions• We specialize in scaling and optimizing WordPress

What are you on about?

Web Applications

Some examples…

How we did it…

• Posts aren’t just for blog posts• We used Posts for user interaction

• Use Custom Post Types for all kinds of “objects”• Locations• Tweets

Can I has plugins?

• Gravity Forms to create posts from a form• Gravity Form stores extra data about the entry• Automatic notification• Export entries• Email template

• Advanced Custom Fields• Great UI to update meta data

• Lots of Custom Post Type creation plugins such as “Ultimate Post Type Manager”

Why WordPress?

“… the first four years were about blogging, the next four were about a CMS, and in my opinion the next four years are about WordPress being used as an app engine…”

WP DAILY: Using WordPress for application development

• It provides a lot of boilerplate functionality out-of-the-box

• It has a rich set of API’s that make modifying and/or extending functionality relatively easy

http://wpdaily.co/app-dev/

WPMU: Build an App With WordPress

• We’ve got Authentication, User Roles, Sanitisation, and Content Types out-of-the-box, to name a few.

• We don’t have to worry about admin screens. • You don’t even have to worry about meta boxes,

taxonomies, or dealing with image upload.

http://wpmu.org/build-a-web-app-with-wordpress/

A case for using WP as application

• Great backend. Clients enjoy WordPress• Built in boilerplate functions• Fantastic software ecosystem (themes, plugins)• Flexible CRUD system to built complex web apps

• Store anything in CPT and meta (post_meta, user_meta)

• A post can be anything, a location, a competition entry, a review

• Battle tested security and scaling solutions

We’re hiring…

Questions?

Other Links

Any questions?Find me on Twitter @milchek

Tweet to WordPress Post:A simple WordPress ‘application’ example to pull tweets from the Twitter Search API and create posts automatically

https://bitbucket.org/milchek/twitter-to-wordpress