WordPress web development

 

What is WordPress development?

WordPress development is the construction of a website in WordPress that uses a hand coded approach, as well as prebuilt software like plugins, themes and templates.

Why develop in WordPress?

WordPress has a strong ecosystem. It can get your website project accelerated with the use of plugins and its fantastic CMS.

There are many WordPress development companies to choose from, which makes it an easy platform to support.

For some websites, there is need to slightly more complex or custom things that can’t be handled with existing code.

This is where coding in WordPress comes in handy.

Creating a faster website

WordPress is a great base for a lot of website but you have to be careful to not overload it with plugins or bloated themes.

The way to make a faster website is to know how to code. This could be front end coding in HTML and CSS and PHP (using WordPress’s architecture) on the backend.

The reason for this approach rather than a purely custom PHP development is to take advantage of WordPress fine structure to add pages, posts and plugins.

Developing a website in WordPress

WordPress has its own software architecture and database structure. Developing in WordPress is quite different than developing in PHP – even though its written in PHP.

You can think of it as a framework. You need to learn the framework in order to make use of its rich set of commands.

The main concepts to learn are:

• Posts, pages and custom post types
• Custom fields
• Hooks (events)

These are the main tools to organize data within WordPress.

Developing a plugin

Simple plugins are surprisingly easy to develop. A plugin is simply a piece of PHP code that sits in a folder called plugins.

A good reason to develop a plugin would be to create custom data structures and API integration.

What is API Integration?

API integration is the process of making a website be able to access the information from another web service.

In other words, it allows two websites to “talk to each other” and exchange information.

Some common scenarios:

• payment gateway
• talking to a booking system
• getting data about travel flights.