It’s no secret that we’re fans of WordPress here at Nicasio Design. WordPress was originally a blogging platform when it first started, but it has no evolved into so much more.

Besides blogging WordPress is being used as a content management system by small and large sites alike.

Here at Nicasio we have found that due to the great documentation of WordPress, it’s robust set of internal functions and classes, and separation of functionality from aesthetics that WordPress makes a great framework for rapid web development for custom projects.

What is a Framework?

Wikipedia defines a Web Application Framework as:

A web application framework is a software framework that is designed to support the development of dynamic websites, Web applications and Web services. The framework aims to alleviate the overhead associated with common activities performed in Web development. For example, many frameworks provide libraries for database access, templating frameworks and session management, and often promote code reuse.

By this definition, from a developer’s standpoint, WordPress is definitely a web application framework.

WordPress has a great class for accessing and interacting with it’s database, a ton of preexisting  functions, a method for easily building bolt on components through it’s plugin system, a solid separation of design from functionality with its theme system, and allows for code to be reused across other websites quickly and easily.

While this seems very basic, many people still think of WordPress as a blogging platform, and over the years it has become so much more than that.