For the last few years many people, including me, have been talking about how WordPress has evolved to where it can power applications, including SaaS platforms. One of the reasons for this is the WordPress REST API. And while I completely agree with this, one of the reasons I think it’s a great choice is that we have several full-featured eCommerce solutions. I wrote about implementing my own subscription billing system using Laravel Cashier and comparing it to working with a WordPress eCommerce platform a while ago. Since then I’ve thought alot about what an eCommerce system like WooCommerce or […]

This week I was a guest on the Press This! Podcast to talk about improving contact forms. I’ve spent the last two years building a WordPress form builder plugin, Caldera Forms, and talking with users about their forms, so this is something I think about a lot. In our discussion, we talked about keeping forms simple, what questions people should ask themselves but don’t, and the importance of planning. You can listen to the full episode here. I wanted to share some things that stood out for me in the conversation that will help you improve the conversion rate of your WordPress […]

In the last 14 years, WordPress has grown into a fully flexible content management system. However, with that growth comes the need to add non-standard endpoints to our workflow. Because these endpoints aren’t covered by the theme template hierarchy, wp-admin, or the default notes of the WordPress REST API, they have to be created from scratch. In this article, I will cover common strategies for dealing with these situations such as adding custom rewrite rules, custom REST API endpoints to give an idea of the variety of methods that exist. Then I will look at how you can use the […]

One of the many great uses for the WordPress REST API is improving your plugin or theme settings screens. Once you add custom REST API endpoints, getting saved settings via AJAX and saving it via AJAX — IE with no additional page loads — is simpler. Using the WordPress REST API instead of admin-ajax is not only more performant but also lets WordPress core do most of the heavy lifting in terms of sanitization and validation. In this article, we will walk through each of the steps to create a settings form page and process that form using the WordPress […]

For as long as I’ve been a WordPress developer, I’ve had a lot of people ask “where should I add my WordPress hooks?” Yes, this is a sign I need more friends who are not WordPress developers, but that’s not the point of this article. Of course, there is no right answer. While ultimately, the answer depends on a variety of things, I want to share a few different patterns and discuss pros and cons of each. That said, I think that these discussions miss an important point: The WordPress Plugins API — aka hooks — is an API that […]

About three years ago, I wrote a post for Torque titled “Yes, You Really Can Use WordPress To Build Apps.” In 2014, this was an emerging idea, but now it’s done quite often. The WordPress REST API, as well as a shift in how we think about WordPress, has contributed to this change. At LoopConf this year, Ryan McCue, the co-lead developer of the WordPress REST API gave a talk called “Next Generation WordPress.” He said that we’ve gone from the WordPress as a blog, to the WordPress as a CMS, to the WordPress as a platform era. It’s a […]