WordPress As An Application Foundation

A presentation by Lance Cleveland at Syntax Conference 2017

Transcript

1. WordPress as an Application Framework presented by: Lance Cleveland
2. Our Project Turn our WordPress plugin into a SaaS application
3. History 2011 Customized WordPress Plugin for Tommy Hilfiger 2012 Public Plugin 2013 Premium Add Ons 2017 Platform Independent SaaS service
4. Choose the right tool for the job.
5. Who Am I? 8+ frameworks 12+ languages 35+ Years Coding 20+ Tech Entrepreneur 7 Years running a 20- person consulting firm
6. Return On Investment Minimize costs of new development. Get to market as quickly as possible. Get people to pay for the service.
7. Why WordPress? SaaS Is A Web Application Familiar UX for Existing clients. 6+ Years of framework compatibility testing Extensive Experience with WordPress
8. Time & Cost Savings
9. Modular versus “Stick Building” Near-zero time spent building rudimentary components. More time spent building the service-specific components.
10. WordPress “Modules” Unlike typical frameworks, WordPress is an Application. The most common modules are already “glued together”.
11. Can Be “Unglued” A key core element, “hooks and filters” make nearly every component easy to revise or replace. This applies to nearly everything but the most fundamental components.
12. Re-use Our Codebase Our legacy application is written for WordPress. A few minor modifications via hooks & filters made one codebase serve the legacy app and SaaS customers.
13. Constraints
14. Overhead An issue with all frameworks. For example, “The Heartbeat” runs every 30 seconds and often loads unneeded code.
15. Has A History More Specific To WordPress Core still tries to support the oldest base user installs. PHP 5.2.4* *luckily for as a framework you control the environment
16. Technology Stack Tend to stay “near” WordPress Core technology. PHP as the base language JavaScript and jQuery for UX MySQL as the database
17. Benefits
18. A Complete Web App WordPress is a complete web app “out of the gate”. Add a couple of plugins, cull things you don’t want and you have a rudimentary version of your app in a week.
19. Vetted Components Access Controls including multi-dimensional user classifications. Well defined UX methods for backend and front-end. Network Communications including multiple fallback libs.
20. Open Source Large open source library of plugins and themes from talented developers. Best way to learn is by example.
21. Knowledge One of the largest developer networks for an application or framework. Millions of articles written by technology experts.
22. Extensibility
23. Core Code Hooks and filters provide extensive control over the core application. Well-documented open source makes “last mile” mods easy.
24. Plugin System No, not like you use on a typical “marketing” site. Encapsulation at the component/functionality level.
25. Scalability
26. The Cloud Cloud Services make it easier than ever to scale legacy apps to sizes much larger than most companies will ever need.
27. WordPress.com WordPress can be scaled “high and wide”. WordPress.com has tailored the IT stack. It serves millions of simultaneous users and hosts billions of posts.
28. Ask Questions & Share Comments @LanceCleveland lance@lance.bio