Using WordPress
as a Web Framework

(ceci n'est pas un blogue)

Sylvain Carle of Praized MediaWordCamp Montral 2009

whois afroginthevalley?

Montral Internet Geek, gone west, came back

Been blogging for almost 10 years

Been doing internet startups for 15 years

Involved in the local communityBarCamp, WebCamp, *Camp

On the board of (current/past)Alliance Numrique, Ile-Sans-Fil

FACIL, Linux-Qubec, CAUCE and a few others

Human Hub

traceroute praizedmedia.com

Company kickstarted during a Yulbiz event in 2006

Three blogger co-founders (2 natives, one natural born)

Got 1Mil+ funding from Garage Technology Canada (now CSL)

Based in Montreal with plans for World Domination ;-)

locate business model

Local Search industry is several Billions per year

Propose a model based on users, not merchants

Enterprisey Technology Stack

Opportunity for Social Software for Local Search

grep platform

Develop a platform for distributed local search

Been thinking about platform for a long time

Figured out that successful platforms are built on top of successful platforms

Figured out that WordPress was an incredibly successful platform and would continue to grow tremendously

more stack

Anti Not Invented Here Syndrome (re-use is king)

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) for servers

Hosted at Amazon EC2 + Liquid Web

Ruby On Rails for platform / API

MySQL + Sphinx for search

WordPress and PHP for distributed views

jQuery + CSS framework

TRAC for subversion + tickets + wiki

talk wordpress

Two plugins, Community and Place Picker

Open Source core libs wrapped for WP

Works with WP, WP-MU, BuddyPress (and soon BBPress)

Free hosting for local blogs with WP on praized.net

blogs.praized.com (praized planet) is where most of our PR/Marketing efforts

ifconfig plugins (praized)

Decided to develop for blog platforms (as Blogs or CMS)

Found local talent on WP-Hackers Mailing List (Hi Steph!)

Did initial release for MT and WP but WP has 95% usage on our network

ifconfig plugins (you)

Use WordPress for views (themes) and extra feature needed thru other pluginsExisting knowledge from sysadmins to designers

Using the WordPress native models (users, posts, comments)

Both these are now much easier with the new WP API for pretty much anything

Backpress is the project to look for even more

Future is probably packaging plugins+themes for specific applications on top of WordPress

uptime api.praized.com

API supports XML and JSON

PHP classes to wrap all call in WP

OAuth and Microformats

50 Mil+ call last month to api.praized.com

Open Source Licenses for most software

Working on Opening licenses for GeoData and places

apt-get install developers

Building a developer community is a process of love, patience and passion

Work with existing developers for similar platforms, our scope is Open WebFirefox and Laconi.ca integration under development

Blogs, mobile apps, web apps, libs in + languages

International, all our software is i18n, all our target platform are, wordpress is by far the most succesful

We end up having wordpress installations that are not blogs at all, check out http://answers.yellowpages.ca for an example

ping me

http://afrog.in/ + http://afroginthevalley.com/http://blogs.praized.com/devhttp://api-tribe.com/ Sandbox for developers@afrognthevalley @sylvaincarle on twitter@afroginthevalley on identi.cahttp://code.google.com/p/praized/http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/praized-community/

www.praized.com