Chapter 8. Enhancing the Power of Open Source Libraries and Plugins

WordPress is one of the most popular open source frameworks, serving millions of people around the world. The WordPress core itself uses dozens of open source libraries to power the existing features. Web application development is a complex and time-consuming affair compared to generic websites. Hence, developers get very limited opportunities for building everything from the ground up, creating the need for using stable open source libraries.

With the latest versions, WordPress has given higher priority for using stable and trending open source libraries within its core. Underscore.js, and jQuery masonry, have been the recent popular additions among such open source libraries. Inclusion of these types of libraries gives a hint about the improvement of WordPress as a web development framework.

We will discuss the various usages of these existing open source libraries within the core and how to adapt them into our applications...