I have been developing Peadig, a WordPress framework built with Bootstrap, for 3 years now with Shane Jones. I'll explain why I did it and the problems I solved when I did.

1. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Why I Built Peadig, my own
WordPress Framework
by Alex Moss, Co-Founder of Peadig
(also Director at FireCask)

2. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Evolution of Me
Working with HTML ~15 years
Working in Search ~8 years
Working with WordPress ~5 years
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig

3. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
WordPress: The Winner of the CMS
I tried a few other CMSs, and
WordPress won the battle.
Reasons included community
support, range of plugins and
themes.
Also, it powered more websites
than the others combined. Today it
powers ~20% of the web.
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig

4. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
WordPress Core is great, but there are a few disadvantages, especially to the
novice:
● Not enough out-of-the-box for what I needed
● Too much choice of similar plugins
● Some of those plugins were developed by morons
I started by developing small plugins that worked, because others didn’t. My
first was Twitter Feed and my second was Facebook Comments. These 2
plugins made me known.
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
How I started Developing with WordPress

5. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
I Started to Get Attention
I was approached by Facebook to build part of what would
later become the official Facebook WordPress plugin. I
provided code, none went in. The finished product didn’t
get a great response.
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Official Facebook Plugin My Plugin

6. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
The Fruits of my Labour...
650,000+ downloads from 20 plugins
Over 1 million inbound links to
peadig.com
Between 500 and 1,000 visitors daily
Over 5,000 mailing list subscriptions
6 months later, we’re just shy of 1,000
sites using Peadig, and over 5,000 sites
using our combined premium products

7. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Back to the Framework
Once I found my feet with plugins, I found myself with the same issues for
themes that I did with plugins. In 2010 had one of 2 framework choices...
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Thesis Genesis
I chose Thesis. I was clearly unhinged, but it was the best of a bad bunch.

8. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Thesis was ok… but was short lived
From what began as a few minor tweaks, Thesis turned into another theme
that I had to fork to do what it should be doing, not what I wanted it to do.
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
● Not good SEO best practice
● Reliant on their own code, both
frontend and backend
● Was slow on future-proofing
● I needed more and more features
as time passed, and technology
improved.

9. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
I decided to Create My Own Framework
I wrote the specification of a framework on a coach in Croatia in August 2011,
and spent a lot of my spare time developing a spec that included:
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
● Easy and extendible options pages
● A shed load of shortcodes for customisation
● Hooks for ease of development and design
● All the nice features I wanted from multiple plugins merged into one
● Respect for WordPress theme requirements
and one more thing...

10. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Social Structured Data
Why are people still ignoring this?! This includes large scale publications
where context is completely inaccurate...
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig

11. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
So I created Peadig (with @shanejones)...
I took all the options I’d want to see both as a webmaster as well as an SEO
and combined it all into one mahoosive options panel.
I also needed to choose a popular HTML framework. Luckily there’s one that
powers 1% of the web...
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
● Mobile-first responsive
● Made by 2 developers at Twitter
● Fast, trustworthy, future-proof and much
better than any internal CSS framework that
any WordPress framework can offer
● Free access to CDN’s

12. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
All sites FireCask develop are Peadig Child Themes
...and other faces are developing child themes (click avatars for links)...
Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Rhys has also developed a “coming
soon”, complete with lead gen, theme
called Peacoming.
Developed on trains/busses in less
than 20 total hours. Easy peasy!

13. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Some sites now using Peadig
Factory Youth Zone Expedia EAN BrightEdge
The Poke 123Reg FireCask

14. Peadig • http://peadig.com/ • http://twitter.com/peadig • http://fb.com/peadig
Here’s a Discount Code for 20% off
everything at Peadig…
FJ450GJ
(also Peacoming is offering 33% off with the code MANCSAS)
*Valid until 9th June 2014