We are very excited for our Developer Track at this year’s WordCamp Portland! Our line up of speakers want to share their knowledge and help you learn more about WordPress site development. Many of these talks address ways to build cleaner, more sustainable websites and development processes with an eye to current and upcoming WordPress capabilities, tools and features.
Alena Holligan – PHP for WordPress
You’ve built a WordPress site or two (or 10), your installed plugins and themes to MOSTLY get what you want. Now you’re ready to learn the inner workings of WordPress and take your development to the next level. Jump into WordPress development and PHP by building a Plugin and learn to speak WordPress’ language: PHP.
Michelle Levine – Dig in on Grid
You’ve heard of CSS Grid but you aren’t quite sure what it is. Or maybe you have started looking at it, but don’t know where to get started. Join me to get hands-on experience in building modern layouts using CSS Grid (and Flexbox). Learn where we came from (hacks, floats, and more hacks) and where we are going. Discover solutions to “impossible layouts”, how to handle users in older browsers, and about the power of Firefox debugging tools for grid.
Dwayne McDaniel – Let’s learn Git. No More Excuses.
Whether it is for re-using the same code or deploying a bug fix or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system. This talk will briefly explore the need for Git, the history and use cases. Then we will jump into how to get started and the basic organizational concepts. We will also examine Github, the web-based Git hosting service. Bring your laptops to play along at home and get started before you leave the room.
Lightning Talks
Our three lightning talks below:
David Greenwald – How To Clean Up the WordPress Database
Is your website running slowly? If you’ve had a WordPress site for a few years, it could be the MySQL database—the silent killer of WordPress performance. For many of us, the database is the most intimidating optimization challenge, leaving it to make sites bloated, expensive, and ready to crash under high traffic. But it’s actually not that scary. Using WordPress plugins and phpMyAdmin, we’ll build the skills to diagnose database issues, go over some common problems and weird edge cases, and learn how to safely fix and maintain the database for top performance.
Andrew Taylor – Holy Blockamole: Tips On Learning Block Development
New development workflows can be scary. Want to create your first custom block but don’t know where to start? This talk will help you get started on your journey to modern JavaScript WordPress development by sharing resources, tips, and lessons learned from developing custom WordPress blocks.
Corey McKrill – Gutenberg and WordCamp.org’s Shortcodes
One of the exciting things about Gutenberg blocks is that they can serve a similar purpose to many shortcodes that generate a “block” of content, but with more flexibility and a much more user-friendly interface. Creating Gutenberg versions of your shortcodes is also a good step in future-proofing your plugins and sites. This talk shows how some of the custom shortcodes from WordCamp.org have been adapted into Gutenberg blocks.
Felix Arntz – Types, Subtypes, Meta, Options – An Abstract View On Data Structures in WordPress
When we work with WordPress, we deal with data that we commonly know as posts, pages, media, comments, options etc. However, the REST API has required us to rethink what some of these data structures are and how they should work, particularly in regards to metadata and options, which have historically been an undefined dump of arbitrary data. This session provides an abstract overview of how data in WordPress is structured and gives insight on questions like: How are post types and taxonomies related? What makes metadata different from options? Where does my own data fit in? If you are developing for WordPress, it is crucial to know some of these concepts. In recent years, WordPress has started to make some structure out of its previous data mess, but is still only touching the surface. And we can all contribute to figuring it out together.
Derek Herman – A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats – The Importance of Code Quality and Why Tide Exists
When the idea of an automated code quality tool was first conceived, it was to help facilitate internal candidate code reviews. However, after a few ideation sessions we quickly identified a number of other more appropriate use cases; including what ultimately became the basis for what Tide is today. Tide is an automated tool to provide insight into WordPress code and highlight areas to improve the quality of plugins and themes. We believe the web can be better. With Tide, the code which underpins every website can be more standardized, faster, and more secure. Tide is focused on WordPress, because no other platform has as large an impact on the state of the web. Tide raises the quality of code one plugin or theme at a time, by elevating the importance of code quality in the developer consciousness. During this talk I will discuss the reasons why we need Tide and how it can lift the WordPress ecosystem into a brighter future.
Joshua Giowaya – Legos for Developers – A Modular Approach to WordPress Development
Let’s explore the benefits of thinking in re-usable blocks. Atomic design, Modular Development, and D.R.Y. methodology improves productivity, enhances UI and empowers authors. We will explore multiple methods to achieve modularity in our WP themes, leveraging the WordPress templating system and Advanced Custom Fields or using blocks in the form of Gutenberg. Regardless if you are ready to learn Javascript deeply and embrace Gutenberg, or set in your ways and sticking with the classic editor — you will leave this talk excited and ready to integrate this strategy into your workflow.