On March 1, 2014, WordCamp St. Louis was held at the Danforth Campus of Washington University in the Laboratory Sciences Building. Our founder, Brian Messenlehner, presented WordPress as an Application Framework (Intermediate) in the User II track at 4:00 pm Central time. Fittingly for a university campus, he gave the talk in a room with chalkboards full of equations behind him.
What the WordPress Application Framework Session Covered
The official description opened with a statement that was still a little bold in early 2014: despite starting out as a blogging platform and existing primarily as a content management system, WordPress is powerful and flexible enough to run any type of web application, including hybrid mobile apps.
The session walked through how to rapidly build scalable and secure applications on WordPress and how to save time and money doing it, then showcased real examples of things built with WordPress by thinking outside the box. Brian shared his slides publicly after the event, and the organizers linked them from the WordCamp site.
Hybrid mobile apps, early
The mention of hybrid mobile apps matters. By then Brian was also a co-founder of AppPresser, the WordPress based framework for building iOS and Android apps. St. Louis was one of the places where he explained, to a room of WordPress users and developers, that the content and users already living in a WordPress site could power a mobile app without starting over on a separate backend.
That idea has since become one of AlphaWeb's core services. Today, more than 1,000 apps have been built on the AppPresser platform, and the pattern is the same one Brian described in 2014: WordPress manages the content, users and business rules, and the app delivers them in a native shell with features like push notifications and offline content.
Speaking to an intermediate crowd
The talk was labeled intermediate on purpose. The audience was a mix of site owners who had outgrown basic themes and developers who were ready to write custom code. For that group, the most useful lessons were practical:
- Plan the data model before the design. Custom post types, taxonomies and meta should match the business, not the other way around.
- Keep logic in plugins. Themes change; business rules should not disappear when they do.
- Use roles and capabilities instead of building a separate permission system.
- Treat performance and security as part of the build, not as a phase after launch.
Those four points are still in our project kickoff checklist.
Brian's Speaker Bio at WordCamp St. Louis
The WordCamp St. Louis speaker page summed up Brian's path: he started his career as a software developer for the US Marines, building web applications and relational databases for the Marine Corps Logistics Command, then built custom web applications for a New Jersey law firm to identify and track insurance and healthcare fraud. It also noted that he was co-authoring Building Web Apps with WordPress for O'Reilly Media and organizing the New Jersey WordPress Meetup group.
That background is why AlphaWeb is comfortable with data heavy, high stakes builds. If you need WordPress to do something more than publish pages, let's talk.
At a glance
- Event: WordCamp St. Louis 2014
- Date: Saturday, March 1, 2014
- Venue: Laboratory Sciences Building, Danforth Campus, Washington University
- Session: WordPress as an Application Framework (Intermediate), User II track, 4:00 pm Central
- Slides: linked from the WordCamp St. Louis site
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.
Related: AppPresser, WordPress as an application framework, headless WordPress, the same talk at WordCamp Sofia 2013.
