Brian Messenlehner
Co-Founder/President AppPresser
Brian Messenlehner is the Co-Founder and President of AppPresser.com where he currently leads our custom development services effort in building and maintaining custom iOS apps, Android apps, WordPress websites, and everything in between. Brian has over 20 years experience leading teams of software developers and building dynamic data driven web applications using open source technologies.
Published O'Reilly Author
Brian is a co-author of "Building Web Apps with WordPress", a technical book published by O'Reilly Media that is about WordPress as an Application Framework. The chapters of Brian's WordPress book include:
- Building Web Apps with WordPress
- WordPress Basics
- Plugins
- Themes
- Custom Post Types & Taxonomies
- Users Roles & Capabilities
- Working with WordPress API's, Objects, and Helper Functions
- Secure WordPress
- JS Frameworks and Workflow
- WP Rest API
- Project Gutenberg, Blocks, and Custom Block Types
- Building WordPress Multisite Networks
- Localizing WordPress Apps
- Scaling Considerations
- Ecommerce
- Mobile Apps with WordPress
- External Service Integrations & Platform Migrations
- The Future
Professional Experience
United States Marine Corps
Sergeant / 4067 Computer Programmer
Brian started his career as a software developer when he was 18 years old for the United States Marine Corps. After bootcamp at Paris Island (Oorah!) Brian was stationed Camp Lejeune, North Carolina where he specialized in building and maintaining web applications and relational databases from the ground up using technologies such as ColdFusion, Classic ASP, ASP.NET, C#, PHP, SQL Server, and Oracle.
Brian attended several advanced programming and database training courses in 29 Palms California as part of his ongoing MOS training. In garrison, Brian developed and maintained several web applications for Camp Lejeune including an Armory Management System that tracked all weapons at all of the armories across the base.
Brian was deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom and received a Navy Achievement Medal for custom development, training and deployment of a secure logistics web application used to track Marines, supplies, ammunition, vehicles, and equipment for the Marine Logistics Command (MLC) during the initial invasion of Iraq. Brian was honorably discharged as a Sergeant in 2004 with an active secret security clearance for the United States military.
Pringle Quinn Anzano, P.C.
Web Application Developer / Database Administrator
Pringle Quinn Anzano, PC is a 25 attorney law firm, with offices in Belmar, Morristown, Mount Laurel and Trenton, New Jersey. Their practice areas include commercial litigation, governmental relations and regulatory law, municipal law, commercial transactions, real estate and land use, and wills and estate law. PQA is best known for its work in representing the Special Investigation Units (SIU) of insurance carriers like Allstate New Jersey Insurance Company, Encompass Insurance, Mercury Insurance Group, and Selective Insurance Company of America, in challenging complex healthcare insurance fraud schemes.
Brian's responsibilities included web application development, database administration and data analysis. The custom systems Brian built and maintained were used by lawyers, paralegals and client staff to assist with litigating complex insurance fraud litigation matters involving automobile-accident fraud rings, healthcare provider fraud, No-Fault PIP/UM/UIM claims, and automobile theft claims.
When Brian started working collaboratively with the FBI on some very elaborate insurance fraud schemes involving some very dangerous people he decided to leave the insurance fraud industry to start his own web development agency and focus on open source development.
Web Development Studios
Founder / President / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
In 2008 Brian Messenlehner founded Web DevStudios, a custom WordPress development agency that in it's prime built WordPress Websites, Plugins, and Themes for clients such as TIME Magazine, NBC, Microsoft, Constant Contact, Uber, Campbells Soup, Starbucks, and The National Park Service, to name a few.
As the Founder and CTO some of Brian's responsibilities included business development, web development scoping/execution/testing/delivery, managing the technologies the company used to run the business, any custom integration with 3rd party software applications, and of course Brian's favorite, large scale database migrations.
Brian sold his shares in his service based company he started to take on AppPresser, a SaaS based company, that provides WordPress users with an easy way to build iOS and Android apps with AppPresser's app builder and WordPress plugins.
SchoolPresser
Co-Founder / President
Brian has 5 kids so education and school transparency are important to him! SchoolPresser is in the business of building and maintaining public school websites leveraging WordPress to slash traditional development and hosting costs.
The vision of SchoolPresser is to have all 14,000+ school districts in the U.S. using WordPress! The money being spent on expensive, proprietary, closed-source SaaS vendor solutions is better spent on an open source platform that can serve schools needs better.
Besides custom website design and development services, SchoolPresser offers custom plugin development, content migrations, affordable hosting, staff training, support, and of course mobile apps powered by AppPresser.
Notable Projects
BuddyPress Theme Development
Brian Messenlehner was a technical editor for "BuddyPress Theme Development" a book authored by Tammie Lister and published by PACKT Publishing. A hands on guide to customize and embellish your BuddyPress website.
Starbucks Employee Training System
Starbucks needed a web application where:
- Employees could login via SSO (Single Sign On) with their Starbucks ID/Password.
- Employees could belong to a group representing the city they work in.
- Employees could watch equipment operation training videos.
- Employees could take a multiple choice test based on the content of the video.
- Managers could see test results for individual employees, stores, or cities depending on their user access.
- Detailed reports on test results could be searched and exported.
Solutions:
- Custom integration with Starbucks SSO system and WordPress users.
- BuddyPress Profile Fields to easily allow users to manage their profile information and BuddyPress Groups to manage users by city.
- WordPress Custom Post Type for Videos and corresponding Meta Data that tracked when users watched the video.
- Timed multiple choice tests powered by Gravity Forms and a custom developed add-on plugin.
- Custom Google Charts API integration to visually report test results.
Newark Public Schools
The School District of Newark New Jersey had about 80 websites all on the Schoolwires platform that were all migrated to a WordPress Multisite Network by page scraping the individual school websites one by one. The migration script would first create a new website on the network for a given school, then a HTTP Request was made to the current domain (Schoolwires) to grab and parse the Schoolwires menu to create the individual pages with the page title, menu hierarchy, and original urls. The migration script then looped back through the created pages grabbing each original url to make a HTTP Request to parse the content for that Schoolwires page and update the WordPress page.
TIME Healthland
One of the first A-list clients Brian secured a WordPress website build for was TIME Magazine hosted on WordPress.com VIP.
TIME Techland
While working on the new TIME Healthland website Brian also secured another custom development project for TIME Magazine, their Techland Blog for Tech, Games, Comics, and Movies. Techland was also hosted on WordPress.com VIP.
DrugFree.org
DrugFree.org needed one web application to manage instead of 1 Drupal website, 2 Expression Engine websites, 2 WordPress websites, and 1 custom asp.net application. Brian wrote a custom migration script to import all of the content from all of the DrugFree.org web properties into a new custom WordPress Multisite Network with community features driven by BuddyPress and bbPress.
South Orange & Maplewood Schools
The School District of South Orange and Maplewood serves more than 7,000 students in nine schools, including six elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school. The community and its schools are racially and economically diverse with more than 90 percent of Columbia High School graduates planning to attend college each year.
Technologies & Skills
Elasticsearch