WordPress® Bible

Chapter 25. Using BackPress as a Development Framework

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Defining BackPress

• Developing with BackPress

• Solving BackPress dependencies

In the world of development, it is rare when developers can completely develop with only one piece of software. Developers who do much of their work with WordPress still have a need to write code in other contexts and for other software packages.

As WordPress developers built out their own suite of services and tools, they realized they were re-engineering much of the same code that was already written in WordPress and that, instead of taking the time to rewrite code every time one of them would worked on a new tool, they should abstract most of the useful code in the WordPress codebase out to a separate library. This library could then be used elsewhere by other WordPress developers as a cornerstone of their development.

This endeavor became known as BackPress because it consists of the code that makes up the backbone of WordPress without being overly WordPress specific.

Note

If you'd like to refer to or use BackPress as you read through this chapter, you can download it via SVN at http://svn.automattic.com/backpress/.

Defining BackPress

In the world of PHP, a number of good development frameworks exist, many of which use a Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach to development. One popular framework is Zend Framework, which is a PHP 5-only framework. CakePHP is another PHP framework that was inspired by the Ruby on Rails system. Symfony provides ...