WordPress.org

JavaScript, PHP, WordPress Plugin Development, Golf, Carpentry

From 2006 – 2008, while in law school, I was experimenting with content management systems for the purpose of developing a database of local case law. After some starts and stops with Drupal and Joomla, I decided to give WordPress a try. Thus, NHCaseLaw.com was born.

As soon as it was launched, the site was kind of an overnight success (even though I had devoted nearly a year to learning WordPress development, and populating the site with content). It received acclaim from news outlets like the NH Bar Journal, The Associated Press, and the Boston Globe. I found myself meeting with members of the NH Bar Association, trial lawyers, judges, and administrators from the courts. There was a lot of interest surrounding an online library of local trial court decisions.

What distinguished WordPress from the other content management systems was the focus on content. WordPress made it easier to classify posts and pages according to their subject matter by using a taxonomy system of tags and categories (which remains a hallmark of the platform today). WordPress also did a better job of making the system extensible through plugins, and those plugins were much more accessible to ordinary bloggers, because they were almost entirely free, and they could easily be found in the WordPress.org directory.

Still, at the time of the site’s launch, I didn’t have a complete solution for displaying content in just the way that I wanted. So, I turned my attention to developing my own custom plugins. I bought a great book, Professional WordPress Plugin Development, by Brad Williams, and followed the process step by step to create some very useful additions to my site. One of these plugins, Super Post Cleaner, solved a basic problem that bloggers were having when importing syndicated content from RSS feeds. It has a 5 star rating on WordPress.org, and over 3,000 installations.

In the process of building some utility plugins to help out my site, I discovered a love of coding. To build a plugin, you need to know both PHP and SQL. Learning PHP led to learning jQuery (a custom library for JavaScript), and learning jQuery led to a growing interest in other languages. Eventually, and through many hours of self-directed learning, I became an expert at VBA, and took a particular interest in using VBA to hack Excel, Word, and Access, as well as using JavaScript for to build APIs and web-scrapers.

I credit finding this path while still a 2L in law school to stumbling upon WordPress.