WordPress vs Web Developer

WordPress vs Web Developer

In this post I will be comparing the development of my website using technologies such as JQuery, AJAX and a CMS with trying to achieve the same outcome using plain HTML/CSS with JavaScript and PHP.

JQuery is a JavaScript library. This means that it is based around JavaScript but adds additional functionality to the base language. JavaScript is a very powerful tool, so why is this necessary? Because as much as JavaScript is capable of a lot, some techniques take a lot of time to implement. Say, for instance, you wanted to run through a loop of every element in an array. This could be easily achieved by creating a loop from 0 -> array.length. Great! But over time, this becomes monotonous and nonsensical. The phrase 're-invent the wheel' comes to mind. This is what libraries like JQuery aim to solve, by providing pre-determined methods to be accessed to utilise common activates. Instead, for this example, we could use JQuery's .each() to achieve the same effect. 

Within the WordPress site created in this module, JQuery has sped up development significantly. Functions which would have taken time to implement have been reduced to a single method. For example, without JQuery, fading in the header on my site could be achieved by a block of CSS, which would need to be researched and manipulated to the desired effect. With JQuery, a simple .fadeIn() does the trick.

Another technology used in my work was AJAX. In my opinion, AJAX is very special. Kinda Magical. For anyone who has experience making HTTP requests without AJAX, being able to make requests without reloading the page is revolutionary. At least, I thought so. Making an application using AJAX is easy, but also makes such a difference to the UX (user experience). AJAX requests are standard in modern web applications, and the effect of making a request without page refresh is not possible with plain HTML/JS. 

A content management system (CMS) such as WordPress gives you most of the tools you need to create your very own website. On top of this, WordPress comes with a blog as standard. This is a massive difference compared to hard-coding a site. WordPress comes with so many features out the box such as a plethora of plugins, widgets and themes. The difference this makes to a developer is significant, but it makes the world of difference for non-techies. The amount of time and effort to create a site with blog functionality with an aesthetic frontend is all saved, as WordPress has an effortless and intuitive service to provide just that. 

In conclusion, using technologies and frameworks to aid in your development is almost essential in modern days. I really see no reason to not use them. Time is saved, effort is saved, headache is saved. And on top of that, technologies like AJAX provide functionality which you are not able to achieve with pure HTML/CSS/JS.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Reddit post

Image
The next piece of the puzzle is to create a post for my subreddit using my application.  For this, Reddit requires key pieces of info or the request will fail. First of all, the 'sr' field is needed, stating the subreddit you wish to post in. Without this, Reddit would not know where to post the content you wish. Secondly, a 'kind' is needed. This could be either 'link', signifying a link to an external source such as a news article, or 'self'. The latter option is for posting a self post (by you) with a title and body - the regular format for a post. Lastly, the title and text of the post is required (obviously). Since this request is being made by AJAX there must be a way to fetch the data that the user has entered in to the request. This stumped me for a while, as my go-to was to use an HTML form, but this system is not synonymous with AJAX, as they achieve the same outcome in a different way. So for this, input boxes with specific ID's are used. ...
Read more

Reddit Authentication & Access tokens

Image
Reddit API For this section, I will be using the Reddit API to perform CRUD on my own subreddit - r/tom_land. Reddit generously offers an API to perform almost all user actions on their site, from scraping posts to moderator duties. Reddit, though, specify in their documentation that users must be authenticated using Oauth to make requests to the API. Oauth is a authentication system which grants access to particular individuals or groups typically using a client ID / secret key combination. This pair is essentially a username and password to access resources on Reddit. Once sent to the server, it knows that you are authorized to access resources, and grants an access token so you can do so. Upon signing up to use the Reddit API, and stating your application is not for commercial purposes, you are supplied with your client ID, and secret key. After making a few test posts on my subreddit, I was ready to start accessing Tom Land.  To begin with, once the document is ready my provide...
Read more

Deleting a Reddit Post

Image
Delete In terms of CRUD, deleting a post is technically part of the easier half. All the server needs to know is what to delete, and that you want to delete it. With the Reddit API, things are not much different. All the server needs is a POST request sent to reddit.com/api/del, with an identifier of the resource to be deleted like an id. Below is my solution to this: As with before, the access token and type are sent in headers. An issue I faced with this request is that I thought the server required the post 'id', which it does not. When reviewing the Reddit API documentation, how the server identifies what to delete is through it's 'fullname' - sent as 'id'. The fullname of an object is the combination of a thing's type such as link, or selfpost, appreviated to 't*_', along with the id of the object itself. for example: t3_fh7si is the fullname for a selfpost with the id of fh7si.  Another issue I faced originally when getting this function to...
Read more