Building Web Apps with WordPress, 2nd Edition

Foreword

For the past several years, I’ve spent 15 to 24 weekends each year visiting software developers around the country. After something like 25,000 conversations, I’ve become convinced of three things:

Web applications are everywhere

It’s difficult to imagine life without web applications in it. Today, we do our banking online. We book hotels and vacations online using web applications; we do our taxes online in what certainly feels like an application; we check in on our phone to Supercuts before we arrive for our appointment using what feels like a simple form, but it, too, is an application. Web applications are everywhere.

Web developers feel completely unable to build them

If you talk to nondevelopers, they’ll tell you that their developer friend is a genius who can do anything with a computer. But if you spend time talking to developers directly, you’ll discover that they see the world very differently.

They look at the web applications that they consider “real” and the companies behind them, and they have convinced themselves that the people that work “over there” know things about building web applications that no one else knows.

They’re convinced that they can build only small applications—that they don’t know what they need to know to do the stuff that will result in wildly popular web applications.

What’s missing is a little bit of information and a lot more confidence

When you sit with developers to talk about web applications, you quickly find out that ...