WordPress Vs Coding – Why Devs Should Learn WordPress?

Today, in this article we are going to discuss WordPress Vs Coding – Why Devs Should Learn WordPress?

Coding from scratch with HTML CSS and JavaScript or WordPress? As software developers, why do we learn to code web apps with JavaScript when we can use WordPress?

We’ll compare WordPress with hand coding, see that WordPress and coding with HTML CSS and JavaScript are similar, and why I recommend software developers to learn WordPress.

WordPress Vs Coding

• WordPress Is A FrameWork Like ReactJs

This is a question I get a lot. Should I learn WordPress to create websites? or should I code them myself with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? A lot of articles on the internet and videos on YouTube on this topic don’t seem to understand what WordPress is.

There are a lot of misconceptions about WordPress. People think that it’s a page builder that is only used to build simple websites and blogs, While if you want a custom web application, you have to code that yourself. But the reality is that you can create any kind of custom web app with WordPress at any level of complexity.

I’m not sure if a lot of people know this, but WordPress is just a generic web framework. It’s more similar to ReactJs or Django for Python than it is to something like Wix.

• Why Devs Should Learn WordPress

I always recommend developers to at least try WordPress. It’s Another framework, but it is very different from the frameworks that we would be using if we were custom-coding a website. Different frameworks offer different levels of functionality.

On the low end, you have ReactJs, which only renders your data. Somewhere in the middle, you have a Ruby on Rails, which sets up a lot more of your app for you. And then on the far end of the spectrum, we have WordPress, which offers a ton of functionality out of the box that would save us months if not years if we were to recreate these functionalities ourselves.

And by learning WordPress, we expand the opportunities that we have. We Expand the amount of projects that we can take on. Believe it or not, there are some websites that we simply can’t create using custom code in a reasonable amount of time.

If a local business asks us to create a website where they or their team can go on and add content to it, think about the many features that we would need to implement for them to have a very usable website. So a feature list could look like this:

If we were creating this with custom code, it would take us years to do it. But with WordPress, this allows us to take on projects like this.

• WordPress Can Make Complex Web Apps

But then a lot of people look at the features that WordPress offers and they say it’s nice, but you can only use WordPress to create blogs. If you want to create a custom web app you have to use HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and you have to code it yourself from scratch.

And that brings us to the second biggest misconception of WordPress, which is it’s only used for creating blogs and content websites. So, back in the day, everyone thought that WordPress was just for making blogs. Then a plugin called woocommerce came out and all of a sudden you can set up a store, like a complete store with a cart, checkout process, and order history inside your WordPress website.

And all of a sudden WordPress was now known for blogging and e-commerce. But then another plug-in came out called MemberPress that turned WordPress into a learning management system.

And another plug-in came out called fusebox, which turned WordPress into a podcasting website. And there’s probably a lot of real estate plugins that turn WordPress into a real estate listing website. The point I’m trying to make is that every time someone creates something new with WordPress, the definition of WordPress just sort of expands.

But the reality is that with WordPress, You can build any custom web app at any level of complexity. I’m not sure if people realize this but WordPress is a generic framework. You can build any web app you want with it. You can build YouTube and Facebook-like websites as well, all built off WordPress.

And that’s how we’re able to create all these different plugins that do a lot of different things that are not necessarily related to blogging.

• But Don’t Get A WordPress Job

Even though I recommend learning WordPress, I don’t recommend getting a WordPress job. The reason is that the job market for WordPress is utter garbage. The reason for this is that WordPress itself is sort of in a weird market position. So, if a company wants to create a complex web app, they could create it on WordPress, but these companies have enough money to hire a team of developers to create the web app on some other modern technology. And so the companies that have a lot of money, don’t spend it on WordPress apps. The other kind of companies who don’t want to make complex apps with WordPress, like your local restaurants, or your local fitness coach, usually just use the core features of WordPress and they don’t go beyond sort of the blogging features or the content management features of WordPress.

So, I hope that made sense to you. We learned that using WordPress is not that much different from custom coding our website and using another web framework. We also learned the reason that we custom code our websites is not because we can’t create custom web apps on WordPress, it’s because there’s no market for WordPress custom web apps. So, that’s why we stick to learning HTML, CSS, and Javascript because there is a job market for these technologies and these skills.

Read More

• Top 10 Best Wallpaper Apps For Your iPhone
• 10 Most Dominant Tech Companies(Tough Competition).