WordCamp Norway 2014 took place on January 25 and 26, 2014, at the Radisson Blu Hotel Nydalen in Oslo, with a contributor day on Sunday at nearby offices. It was snowy, it was cold, and it was one of the friendliest WordPress events Brian Messenlehner, our founder, has attended. He was on the program with a session called Building Web Apps with WordPress, scheduled across the 15:20 and 15:50 slots.
A talk with a book behind it
The title was not an accident. At the time, Brian and his co-author Jason Coleman were finishing Building Web Apps with WordPress for O'Reilly Media, and the first edition was released that April. The Oslo session was a preview of the book's core argument: WordPress is not only a place to publish posts, it is a framework you can use to build real applications.
The speaker bio on the WordCamp Norway site described Brian as someone who came from a background of building complex web applications and had always looked at WordPress as more than a blogging system or a basic CMS. That is a fair summary of the talk. It covered the building blocks that turn a WordPress install into an application:
- Users, roles and capabilities as a ready made permission system.
- Custom post types and custom fields to model the data an app actually needs.
- Plugins as the home for business logic, so the theme stays focused on presentation.
- Hooks and filters to extend core behavior without editing core files.
- APIs to connect WordPress to other services and to mobile front ends.
An international audience
Almost every presentation at WordCamp Norway 2014 was given in English because the crowd came from all over Europe, so the questions after a session came from many different kinds of projects. That variety is useful for any developer. A pattern that works for a publisher in New York has to hold up for an agency in Oslo or a startup in Stockholm too. The ideas that survive that test are the ones worth writing into a book.
What we carried forward
The approach from that Oslo session still guides how AlphaWeb scopes work. When a client describes a portal, a directory, a learning platform or an internal tool, we map it to WordPress primitives first. Which data is a custom post type? Which relationships need a taxonomy? Which actions belong in a custom plugin? What has to be exposed through the REST API for a mobile app or a third party system?
Answering those questions early keeps projects lean. Clients get a platform with a familiar admin, a huge ecosystem of vetted plugins, and code that another WordPress developer can understand years from now. That is the long term value of treating WordPress as an application framework rather than a theme with some extras.
Remembering the trip
Events like WordCamp Norway are a reminder that the WordPress project is global and volunteer driven. The organizers and volunteers in Oslo put on a great event, and the shirt with the Viking ship still gets compliments.
If you are planning a custom build and want a team that has been thinking about WordPress this way since before the book came out, get in touch with AlphaWeb.
At a glance
- Event: WordCamp Norway 2014
- Dates: January 25 and 26, 2014
- Venue: Radisson Blu Hotel Nydalen, Oslo, with contributor day nearby on Sunday
- Session: Building Web Apps with WordPress, 15:20 and 15:50 slots
- Related: the O'Reilly book of the same name was released in April 2014
Related: First Copies of Building Web Apps with WordPress from O'Reilly, WordCamp Sofia 2013: WordPress as an Application Framework and WordCamp St. Louis 2014: Taking WordPress Beyond the Blog.
Have a question about this event or a project like the ones mentioned here? Reach out to AlphaWeb and Brian will be glad to talk it through. We are always happy to compare notes on WordPress, mobile apps and migrations.
