Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake - WordPress Web Application Development

Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake is a freelance web developer, writer, and an open source enthusiast.

He also provides technical consultation on large scale web applications to one of the leading software development firms in Sri Lanka.

Rakhitha is the creator of www.innovativephp.com, where he writes tutorials on the latest web development and design technologies. He is also a regular contributor to a number of popular websites such as 1stwebdesigner, the Tuts+ network, and the SitePoint network. Building Impressive Presentations with impress.js was his first book, also published by Packt Publishing.

In his spare time, he likes to watch cricket and spend time with his family. Make sure you visit him online at www.innovativephp.com and follow him on Google+ at http://goo.gl/UiEf5B.

I would like to thank my parents and my brother for the encouragement and help they provided throughout the various tasks in this book. Also, I would like to thank my family members and friends at Providence for consistently motivating me to complete my second book for Packt Publishing.

I would also like to thank the Packt Publishing team members; Parita Khedekar for inviting me to write this book, Erol Staveley and Saleem Ahmed for the support throughout the book as Acquisition Editors, Abhijit Suvarna for being the Project Coordinator of the book, and the reviewers for providing honest feedback to improve the book.

Finally, I would like to thank you for reading my book and being one of the most important people who helped me make this book a success.

Rudolf Boogerman is of Dutch origin, born in England, and has lived in Belgium since 2007. He first studied graphic arts, but learned several programming/scripting languages hands-on, starting from 1990. From then on, he primarily developed multimedia presentations for a wide variety of projects worldwide.

In 1997 he created his first site, www.raboo.info, to show his own artwork. After this first experience on the Web, he got very excited and decided to combine his artistic background with web development. For the past 5 years, he has been primarily working with WordPress and Joomla! and developing plugins/extensions for both platforms.

Rudolf is the founder of Raboo Design (a visual communication agency), Footprint Visual Communication (visual communication agency), Footprint add-ons (extensions for Joomla!), WP 21 century (plugins for WordPress), and Miracle Tutorials (a blog with step-by-step advice on video and audio on the Web).

Michael Cannon , Peichi's smiling man, is an adventurous water rat, Chief People Officer, cyclist, full stack developer, poet, WWOOFer, and a world traveler. At his core, he is the happiest of all being productive, doing something different, living simply, and sharing with people.

Through Aihrus, he supports TYPO3 and WordPress clients; develops software-based products; and provides business, IT, and software development mentoring.

As Axelerant's Chief People Officer, he gets to collaborate with awesome teammates and smart folks as part of exciting open source projects, even as he continues to explore the world.

Germany, India, and Taiwan have been his homes since 2008. He has visited an average of five countries every year since 2005. In 2012, it was 14 countries. In 2013, nine countries have padded his feet or his bicycle wheels so far.

Geert De Deckere is a web developer living in Belgium. Around 10 years ago, he wrote his first lines of PHP. He loves to code and play around with ever-evolving web technologies such as WordPress. Apart from that, he also enjoys cycling (especially in the mountains), cooking, working in his vegetable garden, and playing an occasional game of chess. His personal website can be found at http://geertdedeckere.be/.

Geert was also a technical reviewer of Kohana 3.0 Beginner's Guide , which is published by Packt Publishing.

Benjamin Moody is a web developer who started using WordPress way back in 2005. Since then, he has developed several custom plugins and themes for clients across North America, as well as a number of WordPress-based web applications. When not coding for clients, Benjamin works on personal application projects and can be found providing support at Toronto WordCamp Happiness Bar.

Doug Sparling works as a web and mobile software developer for Andrews McMeel Universal, a publishing and syndication company in Kansas City, MO. As a long-time employee of the company, he has built everything from the GoComics Android app to its registration, e-commerce systems, web services, and various websites using Ruby on Rails. He's now busy building another site in Rails and porting a Perl-based e-mail system to Go. Some of the AMU properties include GoComics.com (http://www.gocomics.com/), PuzzleSociety.com (http://puzzlesociety.com/), Doonesbury.com (http://doonesbury.slate.com/), and Dilbert.com (http://dilbert.com/).

He is also the Director of Technology for a small web development firm called New Age Graphics (www.newage-graphics.com). After creating a custom CMS using C# and ASP.NET, all his work has moved to WordPress since the time WordPress 3.0 was released, eliminating the need to ever run Windows again.

Doug is a passionate advocate for WordPress and has written several WordPress plugins, can be found on the WordPress forums answering questions (and writing sample code) under the username "scriptrunner", and occasionally plays the role of a grammar nerd as a volunteer in the WordPress Codex Documentation team.