How will you benefit?
Thanks to its open source architecture, ease of use, and customization possibilities, WordPress has succeeded in differentiating itself from other weblog publishing platforms and even other open source solutions.
WordPress features
The main WordPress features of interest to developers are:
- Its a huge community of users and developers
- The millions of WordPress blogs
- Major sites using it, including a number of US government agencies
- Security issues treated almost instantly
- Unmatched flexibility with thousands of available plugins
- High level of customizability with thousands of available themes
- Search engine friendly functionalities
- Ease of use, maintenance, and upgrade
- A great way to meet new people!
With such a list, it is no wonder that—every day—more and more private users and companies are turning to WordPress for their publishing needs. This of course presents a fertile ground for WordPress developers to show off their skills.
The opportunity for a WordPress developer in these circumstances becomes obvious.
With such a huge number of sites running it, the market is hungry for WordPress experts, and not just development experts. If you are proficient in the installation and setup of WordPress, you may easily have your hands full of work.
The fact that a number of major sites use WordPress means that there is also an opportunity for high profile work.
This also means that you can be fairly certain about the future of WordPress. Your investment in time and efforts, first in reading this book, and then in enhancing your development skills, is likely to pay off with WordPress.
With online security becoming a bigger issue each day, it is a relief to see the WordPress development team reacting promptly to newly discovered security issues.
This makes everyone even more comfortable and confident in using WordPress.
With WordPress, the plugin author is allowed total control over every aspect of the site. You are able to completely customize the way the site looks and behaves.
The opportunity is there for everyone—from beginners (developing useful plugins) to professionals (creating total WordPress makeovers such as e-commerce, marketing, or job portal sites—where you can hardly recognize that the site is running a WordPress installation).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of today's Internet presence. Just creating a site is not enough anymore, as there are now hundreds of millions of competing websites out there.
Using a platform such as WordPress will be really valuable, especially in the long term. WordPress has significant built-in SEO features and also most of the other aspects of modern SEO technologies available through custom plugins (and you can always write one to match your needs!)
WordPress is meant for beginners and used by professionals. This mix is rarely seen in any other open source platforms.
After the five minute installation, most users immediately feel comfortable in the WordPress administration panels. Writing a post and organizing categories is as simple as it should be.
The whole WordPress installation consists of putting the files on the server and setting the assigned database, and it is very easy to back up or move it to another server.
WordPress and its plugins can be upgraded with a click of a button; all this makes the job of maintaining a WordPress website (or even several at the same time), a breeze.
If you are a WordPress developer, the chances are that you will have your own hosted WordPress blog. Having a personal blog creates a great opportunity to create many new contacts—both business and friends.
When you release a WordPress plugin, you will meet hundreds of people who are going to use it on their own sites. You will also have people visit you for support, or just to say Thank you!
Plugins as tool for promotion
With such a huge user base, a well written plugin will probably be downloaded tens of thousands of times.
This will create awareness about you as a plugin author and your site as a probable source for some cool stuff. Having in mind how difficult it is to get noticed on the Internet today, this becomes a very important aspect of plugin development that you get for free.
Creating fresh, new, and usable plugins can help you go a long way. It has really helped me a lot in my field of work and has created a lot of opportunities–one certainly being, the pleasure of writing this book.
Dogfooding WordPress plugins
You may sometimes wish to create a plugin just for yourself, to fulfil a specific need that can arise at a given moment. This is how I started writing plugins initially, as I needed certain functionalities that were not available in WordPress at the time.
The term dogfooding describes a dog food company that is ready to eat its own dog food. It means the company is confident about its own product and uses it for the purpose it was produced for.
In WordPress' terms, it means that you should always strive to create a plugin that satisfies your needs. On my personal site, I still use almost all of the plugins I created, and I only update them over time, as and when WordPress is updated, or my needs change.
This has a positive side effect of ensuring that your plugins will probably be attractive to many other users as well. Assuming that you are critical about your own work, and your confidence in using your own plugins sends out a clear message on how good they are.