Building Web Apps with WordPress, 2nd Edition

Foreword

For the past several years, I’ve spent 15 to 24 weekends each year visiting software developers around the country. After something like 25,000 conversations, I’ve become convinced of three things:

Web applications are everywhere

It’s difficult to imagine life without web applications in it. Today, we do our banking online. We book hotels and vacations online using web applications; we do our taxes online in what certainly feels like an application; we check in on our phone to Supercuts before we arrive for our appointment using what feels like a simple form, but it, too, is an application. Web applications are everywhere.

Web developers feel completely unable to build them

If you talk to nondevelopers, they’ll tell you that their developer friend is a genius who can do anything with a computer. But if you spend time talking to developers directly, you’ll discover that they see the world very differently.

They look at the web applications that they consider “real” and the companies behind them, and they have convinced themselves that the people that work “over there” know things about building web applications that no one else knows.

They’re convinced that they can build only small applications—that they don’t know what they need to know to do the stuff that will result in wildly popular web applications.

What’s missing is a little bit of information and a lot more confidence

When you sit with developers to talk about web applications, you quickly find out that the missing element is confidence more than anything else. Writing the code isn’t hard once you know what you need to do. But that doesn’t mean that developers don’t need a bit more insight into the process.

These conversations have taken place across the country at local conferences called WordCamps. These are community events that typically have 200 to 500 participants—equally split between developers and nondevelopers. What they have in common is the use or the intention to use the web publishing product called WordPress.

WordPress, if you’ve never heard of it, powers a third of the internet sites on the planet. It’s primarily used as a content publishing platform. But the truth is that you can use WordPress to kickstart your web application.

That’s what you’ll find in the pages of this book.

What I love about this book is that it doesn’t skimp in the early chapters. It helps readers slowly navigate the early questions. It gives you confidence. And I know how valuable you’ll find that. It creates a roadmap for how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

But what I also love about this book is that it pushes you deeper into the details of every line of code you need to write. Some of it will be new to you. Some of it won’t. But what you won’t find is high-level writing that doesn’t explain itself and leaves you wondering how to apply your newfound knowledge.

Instead, Brian and Jason introduce you to every part of WordPress that you need to know to use it as a web application framework. There are coding schools today that need to teach from this material. Thankfully, you don’t need to pay for those schools, which cost far more than this book.

I can’t recommend this book with any more excitement than in this foreword.

Until now you may have thought that there were two kinds of developers. The first is the kind who builds hardcore applications that you never could. The other is the kind like you, who could build small or simple applications.

When you’ve finished reading this book, there is one thing that I know for sure. When you’re done, when you’ve read the words and played with the code, when you’ve put it into action—you will know that there’s only one kind of developer: the kind that can build anything they can imagine, and you’re that kind of developer.

The fact that you’re reading these words now makes that already true. Now it’s time for you to discover that reality.

Chris Lema

VP of Products & Innovation at Liquid Web