At BrowserStudios we spend most of our time programming building web applications using frameworks und computer languages such as PHP, ASP.NET, JavaScript and Java.
A study created by W3Techs (Web Technology Surveys) points out that PHP is leading server-side programming for websites with 78.8 percent. That is outstanding!
WordPress – an Economical Alternative to Develop Web Applications and In-Browser Apps
Based on an article by managewp and pingdom, WordPress seems to have paved its path to one of the most applied blogging platforms (Source: pingdom , managewp).
The percentage of websites using various server-side programming languages.
WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world by an enormous margin. That would be at least the reasonable conclusion to be made from Pingdom’s recent survey which revealed that self-hosted WordPress powers 48 of the top 100 blogs in the world (as ranked by Technorati). – ManageWP
What is interesting to mention from this survey is that the self-hosted WordPress’ is its biggest contestant to the hosted version.
Whilst WordPress was originally developed as a blogging platform, the release of v3.0 moved it subtle into a full-fledged CMS area. WordPress is built for customization. It was created in such a way that each and every section is customizable.
With the recent versions 3.4.2 and 3.5., WordPress started to integrate another functionality called custom post type (CPT). Custom Post Types are a new set of administrative options appearing along with the default post types such as Posts, Pages, and Attachments etc. A Custom Post Type can store any type of information.
If you apply them the correct way it will sky rocket your blog beyond a regular content management system (CMS). With this in mind, the WordPress core is based on PHP, HTML, Javascript and CSS. All this is leveraged using a MySQL database, which makes the WordPress framework to a technologically and economical alternative for web applications and web develpment.
Top 100 blogging Platforms based on a survey by Pingdom.
The continues use of weblogs for users and a Facebook-like presents, it’s expected to leverage an even greater user acceptance throughout the next four years. In addition, I am not going to go deeper in terms of Backbone.js and Underscore.js. But both are an essential part since the WordPress Admin Panel integrated them. This means that with minimal effort, we can begin to utilize these fantastic JavaScript libraries in our own plugins.
The WordPress team is currently following state of the art web technologies and enables you to operate software that is technically in a top notch state. WordPress is the world’s most widely used content management system (CMS), and does not only provide a private diary but also extensive web projects for the business sector. ZDNet, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Reuters amongst millions others are using WordPress!
There are so many outstanding features that make WordPress very desirable to newcomers as well as technology lovers such as I am. This list should give you a pretty good idea of what you’ll be dealing with:
- Usability is not really a function but a factor that is undeniable
- Easy installation and update automation
- Post preview
- WYSIWYG-Editor
- Upload of images and files into the media center
- User Management
- Comment Management
- Linkmanager
- Spam Protection
- Communication Services
- AJAX
- Compliance with current web standards
It’s conceivable why so many website owners choose WordPress for its unique levels of sharing and hiding that may be desired from time to time.
WordPress has been designed and continues to be upgraded to accommodate the many changes to SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. That means your posts and your whole site will attract search engines like a magnet. Attracting search engines will be the most important factor to generate organic traffic for you and your site will rank higher on search engine queries.
Besides theme and plug-in development, we thrive to provide means for you and your site to let you rank higher in search engine results as time goes by. Ask us for a quote on Search Engine Optimization and we’ll get back to you within a day.
WordPress functions are an essential component of WordPress theme development; once you understand how they work, it’s easy to create your own custom WordPress themes. Many of the core WordPress functions are useful to Plugin and Theme developers.
Having said all this, WordPress out of the box builds a good foundation to start blogging. However, nothing that great comes without work and knowledge on how to improve and adapt the system. At WordPress you can choose from literally thousands of Plugins and Widgets, which add software to the core to do website specific things. But spend your time wisely because not every plugin is worth installing it.
Note: A study by Vladimir Tomberg demonstrates that by using LePress, teachers experienced an enhanced level of control over several aspects of the course and this reinforced their perception about the ease of use of the system. This is only one good source for economical WordPress development. LePress is a teacher control in a blog-based personal Learning Environment.
WordPress Networks and Communities
WordPress MultiSite is native to WordPress but disabled by default. Once activated, you can set up a WordPress network with any number of independent WordPress instances. Sounds good right?! However, you won’t need it when you do the following:
- Client’s Small Business Website
- Portfolio Website
- Personal Blog
- Managing Many Websites
The WordPress core gets updated frequently and all is done with a one click action. All instances access the same plugins. All themes can be assigned across the network or only selectively to one blog.
The most prominent example of a WordPress Multisite is WordPress.com – It houses several million blogs and displays its capabilities using WordPress Multisite. As mentioned before, WordPress is a database driven application, all text content, such as posts and comments are stored in the database and all uploaded media, such as images and videos are stored on the web space. Content is separated from the design – this provides easy means to exchange design without causing interference.
WordPress holds thousands of themes in its repository. Some of them are freely available and some are not, those that cost are called premium templates and are usually from third party vendors. You can easily browse, install and activate themes from within the WordPress administration area and all this is managed by only a few clicks.
Since smart phones and tablets, a website has an unspoken requirement to adapt to its screen size. This is almost required for any project that is open to the web. Some are not but that is a different story. Those themes are called Responsive Themes. They are built on a flexible foundation with fluid grid system that optimizes your website to mobile devices and desktop computers, or any other imaginable environment.
One very popular responsive frame work is Twitter’s Bootstrap template machine. Its front-end framework enables you to include a faster and easier web application development into your routine. This collection will help you to find best of best free twitter bootstrap themes, bootstrap templates, bootstrap skins and bootstrap resources. Twitter bootstrap themes have an extensive documentation and are used by more than 1% of all websites on the World Wide Web.
Note: Themes definitely aren’t what they used to be. You used to get a zip file with a few PHP files and a brief help file telling you how to modify code (by hand, mind you). These days, even the less advanced commercial WordPress themes come equipped with custom options frameworks, template builders, advanced Javascript usage and extensive theme documentation with installation videos. Oftentimes, buyers don’t even have to touch the theme’s source files. Modification and customization can be done right within the WordPress admin panel. How convenient.
Plugins can extend the functionality of WordPress in all imaginary ways. You can add a Survey or a Statistical function; you can connect to social networks and implement the most established publishing functions you can imagine. The plugin method has been created so that the core stays untouched. This award promotes the WordPress community.
You will find the official plugin directory (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/) and thousands of freely available extensions right there. The following list shows a few plugins that have been proven to be useful in the past:
- Cron GUI (Manage crone jobs) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cron-view/
- Statify (Plugin for access statistics) http://statify.de/
- Transposh Translation Filter (Plugin for translation) http://transposh.org/
Note: The use of plugins is recommended but make sure you examine code components. The internet isn’t all that trustworthy. If you want to leave it up to us, give us a shout. Almost all plugins that are freely available contain information on donations or banners. Those might not be useful in a subsequent commercial use. Furthermore, plugins come with a license that has to be considered!
Analysis of existing WordPress – Objects (Post, Page, Taxonomies, Custom Post Types) and their Functionalities
As a blog, WordPress comes with a whole bunch of objects such as:
- Sites
- Post
- Page
- Comments
- Taxonomies
- Custom Post Type
The site is the parent blog or a summary of articles and pages right from a weblog. In a multi-site environment at the same time more weblogs can be managed together. For this, the commercial deployment of weblogs is about http://wordpress.com/ the best example.
The entries in a blog are called posts and are the main products usually listed in reverse chronological order. Meaning, the most recent posts can be found at the top. Older posts are displayed in part on other sites or listed in the archives.
Page
Pages are static and are not listed by date. Pages do not usually use tags or categories. Having said that, magazine types of applications are based on tags and they display their posts on different pages based on the active tag. Pages can be displayed in the sidebar with the widget “pages”.
Comments
In many blogs, it is possible to comment on a blog post to express your thoughts on the very same idea. On coding websites, developer who tried to follow the tutorial often ran into problems and post possible solutions. With WordPress you have the option to specify whether the comment will be displayed instantly or after someone moderated it. This is a good way to prevent vandalism and spam in blogs.
Taxonomies
Taxonomies are also referred as to categories. They are used for classification of articles. As mentioned, you can apply those taxonomies to build hierarchical categories, and tag clouds. WordPress 3 introduced custom taxonomies as a core feature. The following release of 3.1 included many features to enhance support of custom taxonomies.
Custom post types
Custom post types and custom taxonomies are user specified items or categories that are referred to WordPress objects. These objects are “derived” from the base objects and are added to the main post in the database. Note, they don’t actually are integrated into the database.
The post type of regular posts is post, pages use page, and attachments. You can now create your own to indicate the type of content created. You could create custom post types for books, movies, reviews, products and so on.
To effectively create and use custom post types, you’ll need to be familiar with the following:
- Creating custom post types
- Creating custom taxonomies
- Creating custom Meta boxes
Custom post types are very powerful!
Note: The existing objects provide a lot of functionality already. But sometimes you just need more functionality. You can leverage custom objects, CSS and JavaScript and/or PHP to enhance your WordPress to even offer different services. Request a quote and send us your requirements and we get back to you.
Analysis of the existing concepts of a weblog (e.g. publishing/ publishing of posts & articles)
Since WordPress is an editorial system, the existing processes of publication and the release of products were investigated in detail. WordPress distinguishes between its different statuses using the following wording:
- New
- Published
- In review – pending
- Draft
- Auto draft
- Future
- Private
- Eine Revision or attachment called
- Trash
Status of a post is displayed on the right hand side in your post
The status of a post is displayed on the right hand side in your post and pages administration. It enables you to follow revisions and visibility of your content.
That means WordPress stays private as long as a user decides whether he wants to publish or ultimately trash the content. The individual status is shown in Illustration 4. Furthermore, the 4-eyes principle has been applied when it comes to deleting items. The status of the items is reflected within the user rights. WordPress offers standard users:
- Super Admin (This is the administrator with additional rights for network related options)
- Administrator (Administrator of a single website)
- Editor (User with rights to publish and manage posts with respect to other users)
- Author (User who is able to publish an articel)
- Contributor (User who can write an article but is not able to publish it)
- Subscriber (Is a user who can manage his user profile)
Rights and roles are described at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
Note: WordPress offers established process for publishing and saving articles. In addition, it is possible to apply individual state transitions, e.g. add notifications. Sufficient roles for an editing system are already available in the standard package. All you have to focus on is to bring you idea to life!
The function reference can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference. This reference is providing a concise overview of what’s available in current and recent versions of the platform. Unfortunately, a derivation of the method’s functionality is currently only possible judging by their names and parameters. But ever since WordPress’s community is available 24/7 developing with the API has become much more rewarding!
Note: As with every platform, you have to work through the documention and hook system of this one, too. I have seen a couple plug-in versions where the code has called the same functions over and over again due to a lack of knowledge of the author. I don’t judge, I only point out my experience.
Plug-ins are a great way to enhance the functionality of your blog by adding extra features leveraging the api. These can be placed anywhere inside your template by function hooks. Over time the extensibility of WordPress’ plug-in system has allow tremendous growth and hundreds of developer-submitted pieces of software.
Note: The creation of plugins provides a relatively simple way to expand the functionality of WordPress. This is similar to the provision of libraries and run-time libraries in the traditional programming languages (C, C + +, C #). We have done quite a bit of programming plugins and we specialize in WordPress development including installation, theming, plugin development, and ongoing maintenance. Get in touch! Send us your requirements and we get back with a quote. We also sign NDS’s so your idea is safe with us!
Designing and then creating a new website can be a daunting prospect. The number of technologies that have to be mastered can be time consuming and expensive. But what if your business could create a cutting-edge website by doing nothing more than filling in a few online forms? This is possible thanks to CMS such as WordPress. WordPress is ideal for programming Web applications, in particular if you apply the already given objects and available database.
Overall this is composed of the individual evaluations of the above and from the experience gathered within a couple projects wirth WordPress. The following points are mentioned:
- High flexibility of the framework
- Ease of use / learning curve
- Easy expandability and compatibility with other frameworks / languages (Javascript, e.g. integration GIS module OpenLayers, jQuery)
- Sustainability through maintenance of the framework
Our web development services:
- Full WordPress implementation & solutions
- Seamless WordPress integration with existing websites where applicable
- Customized WordPress theme development
- Converting your design into a fully operational WordPress site
- Flexible maintenance contracts for your specific needs
- Plugin customization, configuration and when required, troubleshooting
- WordPress blog development
- Custom plugin development
- Templates designed from concept to implementation
And all that is covered by an NDA! So your idea is safe with us.