I just gave a talk in Bangalore PHP Meetup about ways in which we can use WordPress as a platform. The following is the slide I used and a little write up about the talk.
What I am going to talk about is how we can use WordPress as a platform to develop PHP applications on top of it.
There are basically two ways in which we can write apps using WordPress.
As a Plugin or a Theme
As a standalone app
As a Plugin or a Theme
This is the most common way of writing apps using WordPress. You basically write a Plugin or a Theme that uses WordPress API. (This is how RoloPress is developed)
Check out the slide for some examples apps using this technique.
As a standalone app
In this technique, we can make use of our knowledge about WordPress functions and API in our non-standard WordPress PHP-based web applications. The easiest way to use this technique is to use BackPress.
BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.
Using BackPress, you can include the necessary files and you will get the WordPress utility functions. My most favourites are the security functions. In additions to using the utility functions, you will also be able to get the following features.
I also go about discussing the scenarios where it is advantages and where it is not so advantages to use BackPress. (You can see those in the slides)
So in a nutshell, if you are a WordPress developer and want to use the familiar WordPress functions in a non-WordPress PHP-based web application that you are developing, then you can use BackPress to get those familiar functions.
I am going to use BackPress in a couple of projects, which I am going to start and so stay tuned.
Okay enough of self-bragging and time for some stats.
Number of Posts
Thanks to my break-up with TV, I got more time to spend with my blog, which can be seen from the increase in the total number of posts. The number of posts slowed down a bit towards the end of the year due to my travel and RoloPress, but on the whole, I am happy with the results
Number of comments
More than the number of posts, the one which gave me more satisfaction, is the number of comments. Last year, I said that I will try to engage more user activity in my blog and one look at the graph should say that I succeeded.
Thanks to all those who commented, you really bought a smile on my face.
Average number of characters in posts
There is a slight increase when compared with the previous years and since things have worked out well so far, I am planning to continue the same this year too.
Total number of characters in all posts
I have almost written (okay typed ) almost double the amount of characters in 2009 when compared with 2008. This is really good and I hope to continue the same next year too.
What’s in for this year?
So for this year, I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins and RoloPress and also planning to learn a couple of languages like Haskel, Scala and R. Let’s see how things turn out
<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>
As promised RoloPress, the WordPress based contact Manger was released at the beginning of this year.
Now the first maintenance release (version 1.1) has been released with a couple of bug fixes and some enhancements. You can read the full list of changes in the announcement post.
You can download the latest version from the homepage and if you are interested, you can check out the source code at github.
Try it out and if you have any feedback, please post it here or in the forums.
I have been droppinghints about a secret project which I have been working on for quite some time and now it’s time to reveal it.
RoloPress
The secret project was RoloPress, a WordPress based, open source contact manager, which I was developing with my friend Steve Bruner. The main distinction of RoloPress is that it is an application build on top of WordPress and is not a separate application with is tied up with WordPress.
Features
Some of the notable features of RoloPress for end users are:
All admin tasks can be performed from front-end itself. You don’t need to visit the admin area.
Ability to add/edit contacts
Ability to add/edit companies
Ability to add/edit notes about contacts or companies
Has lot of readymade widgets (around 8 in the initial release)
Developer features
RoloPress follows WordPress Plugin architecture and provides lot of features for developers to play around.
Highly extendable API
Lot of custom hooks and filters
Look and feel can be easily modified by creating child themes
Most of the existing WordPress Plugins will work out of the box
Easy to extend (If you know how to write a WordPress Plugin then you can easily write Plugins for RoloPress)
Release
The initial plan was to show the preview in WordCamp NYC (Now you know why I was interested in WordCamp NYC ) and release it on 16-Nov-2009. But during the preview session, Matt (founder of WordPress) gave some interesting feedback and we are working on them now. Unfortunately these changes are not backward compatible and so we have held back the release till those changed are incorporated. So you have to wait for sometime
For those who can’t wait, here is a presentation about RoloPress which was used in the preview session in WordCamp NYC.
