This is the first entry in a series where we want to tell you the tools we usually use in our work. We will try not to abuse words and technicalities (although sometimes we will wear glasses and go down to the mud).
We start with WordPress, one of the favorite tools for our work. It is difficult not to know it since it is one of the most popular CMS or content managers in the market.
WordPress, our favorite content manager
Although everyone knows him, there are not so many who really know his potential. We have found clients and friends that when you recommend it, the first thing they tell you is: ‘I don’t want to have a blog’. There is a general tendency to associate that WordPress is the same as having a blog and nothing is further from reality.
In its beginnings it was born to support an extensive community of bloggers, but over time it has become a robust CMS capable of maintaining any type of web application. There are currently 60 million sites running with WordPress technology on the Internet.
In our case we use it as a development framework because it facilitates basic tasks: CRUD operations, user management, multimedia resources, comments and, of course, manage the contents. All this without having to throw a single line of code, which is much appreciated.
On the other hand, it has a community of developers that implement a good number of plugins every day that can make your life easier. If you need, for example, to generate a sitemap or cache your site to minimize the waste of resources, you will surely find someone who has implemented a solution, saving you from reinventing the wheel.
Everything must be said that it also has its shadows: if you are accustomed to languages such as JAVA or C ++, you will surely look with contempt at languages interpreted as PHP (we did it;), it is not quite well structured and object oriented put it on With a shoehorn.
But if you go a little further, you will realize that it is a flexible system in which it really depends on you, as a programmer, to be organized and apply the design patterns you need.
Returning to WordPress and simplifying its architecture to the fullest, it can be divided into three parts:
WordPress – Simplistic Architecture
Basic rule: the core is not touched. If you do, bye bye to the possibility of updating the version, with the consequent security problem and loss of new features. The other two legs, plugins and themes really allow us to develop custom applications.
As a general rule, we create an object-oriented plugin with all the functionalities we need, operations with the data model, obtaining information, interaction with other APIs, etc.
Then we create a theme from scratch, based on the layout we have done in HTML5. We cut each section to complete its corresponding templates: cover, files, pages, header, footer, sidebar, comments … and we also add the code necessary to dynamically display the content managed by the CMS.
WordPress maintains an extensive hierarchy of elements that allow the presentation of the application to be shaped. If you are going to dedicate yourself to the creation of themes, it is essential to know it by heart. Want to know more facts about WordPress? Just go to www.facts.net.