Slides from our presentation at a WPMelb meetup on using WordPress for Application development.

1. WordPress for Applications
Subtitles – I like them

2. 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

3. What are you on about?

5. Web Applications

6. Some examples…

10. 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

13. 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”

14. Why WordPress?

15. “… 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…”

16. 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/

17. 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/

19. 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

21. We’re hiring…

22. Questions?

23. 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