There’s been a lot of talk about “WordPress as an application platform” recently. Whether you agree with the practicality of using WP as an application platform or not, there are still many ways you can extend it to get much more out of it than a typical CMS (for instance, custom settings pages, custom user roles, custom metaboxes, custom dashboard widgets, custom admin themes, APIs galore…). I’d like to share some insights from real projects where I’ve used these things, highlight some current WP shortcomings (custom post statuses, sigh), and talk about what’s coming down the road (JSON API, metadata UI, etc.) that will make it even easier to build on WordPress in app-like ways.