In recent years, WordPress has matured from being the most popular blogging tool to the most popular content management system. Thousands of developers around the world are making a living from WordPress design and development. As more and more people become interested in using WordPress, there are discussions and arguments for exploring the possibilities of using this amazing framework for web application development.

The future seems bright as WordPress has already got dozens of built-in modules, which can be easily adapted to web application development using some slight modifications. Since you are already reading this book, you are probably someone who is really excited to see how WordPress fits into web application development. Throughout this book, we are going to learn how we can inject the best practices of web development into the WordPress framework to build web applications in a rapid process.

Basically, this book will be important for developers from two different perspectives. On one hand, WordPress developers of beginner level to intermediate level can get the knowledge of cutting edge web development technologies and techniques to build complex applications. On the other hand, web development experts who are already familiar with popular PHP frameworks can learn WordPress for rapid application development. So let's get started!

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

In order to work through this book, you should be familiar with WordPress themes, plugins, and its overall process. Developers who are experienced in PHP frameworks can work with this book while using the reference sources to learn WordPress. By the end of this chapter, you will have the ability to make the decision on choosing WordPress for web development.