Reddit reviews Building Web Apps with WordPress: WordPress as an Application Framework

I'm doing a video(hopefully series) where we learn WP techniques by looking at code from advanced WP developers. Would you mind beta testing it when I finish it?


I went through teaching myself WP for a job, after being a developer in other stuff so I probably walked the same path.


Here's what I wish I knew before:

1. How to use WP as a code library to build web apps. Most things you find will talk about point and click stuff with WP. But this is the slow way to do things as a developer. This book talks about how you can build web apps easily with WP.
   
   
2. How to modify the behavior of WP without changing the code with the Plugins API. This is singlehandedly the biggest thing that's going to help you do whatever you want in WP.
   
   
3. The Plugin's API's EventDriven design pattern. Learning this will make everything 'click' for you:
   
   
   Event driven pattern: https://tommcfarlin.com/wordpress-and-mvc/
   
   (A bit advanced, the Event-driven Design pattern is derived from the observer pattern. The Plugins API uses just Event-Driven but other API's in WP use other variants of the observer pattern)
   
   
   Observer pattern in WP: https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/design-patterns-in-wordpress-an-introduction--wp-31604
   
   Observer pattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BpmfnqjgzQ&t=1305s
   
   
   
4. Don't make the mistake of trying to build a theme from scratch for most clients. In many cases that's like rewriting the DOM before you make the front end of the site. A good theme framework you can trust as a developer: https://my.studiopress.com/themes/genesis/
   
   
5. Work smarter not harder, use WP's many internal APIs: https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_APIs