December 11, 2015 — Whenever a post is saved, a page is loaded, a comment is created or a template is loaded, WordPress fires off events that, as developers, we have loved and cherished. These events are hooks. While hooks have been the quintessential building blocks of WordPress for over a decade, they come with a cost. Often times, developers will hook functionality into the save_post event, for instance, to fire off a notification to an external service or perform some sort of background task. The more of these tasks are hooked into WordPress, the slower WordPress becomes.

In this talk, I will show you how to alleviate these bottlenecks with asynchronous hooks – hooks that can be used to perform the exact same tasks, but not block the rest of WordPress from running. Through a library created by 10up’s Eric Mann and John Bloch for TechCrunch on WordPress VIP, the overhead of running actions can be reduced to a negligible amount.

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December 11, 2015 — Page caching doesn’t work for everyone! Sites that handle a large number logged-in users like Membership sites, Multisite networks, BuddyPress sites, or bbPress forums need special treatment to scale effectively. I’ll share my experience in building and managing large Multisite networks to give tips and tricks to speeding up your dynamic websites and coding for scale.

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December 11, 2015 — What’s going on with e-commerce. How hard is it to set up a store? What needs to go into a store? Is it mostly technical knowledge, marketing, or product knowledge? What are the WordPress options and how do they differ from some of the bigger hosted services on the market?

December 10, 2015 — Delivering a fast, performant website is one of the most important elements of building websites and web applications today. The first few seconds of load time can determine whether a user engages with or leaves a site. In this talk, we will look at advanced techniques for optimizing the front-end performance of a WordPress driven website. Including ways to defer and async JavaScript; lazy load images, videos, and other types of content; prioritizing the critical rendering path css for multiple content types; and testing performance.

December 10, 2015 — This talk will cover a few key “Aha” moments that you should have about the way WordPress works. We’ll talk about things like the template hierarchy, what’s going on in wp-config, where WordPress content is stored (the database vs. the file system), how posts and pages and custom post types are represented in the database, what folks are talking about when they talk about hooks and filters, and just generally review the “behind the scenes” mechanics of how WordPress works. We’ll also touch on a few “tricks of the trade” that you might not realize are out there (version control, staging sites, caching, Vagrant, and other fun tools to make development with WordPress just a little bit easier).

This talk is aimed at designers and new developers who maybe have a few PHP tricks up their sleeves, but still haven’t figured out some of the details behind the scenes.

If you’ve never edited functions.php and don’t know what it is, this probably isn’t a good talk for you just yet. If you’ve written a plugin or modified several .php files in your WordPress themes, this talk will probably be a bit too basic for you. If you’ve set up a child theme before and know what functions.php is, even if you haven’t really used it all that much, or even at all…. you’re probably the exact person who will get a lot out of this talk. And if that’s you, you should be able to walk away with a solid mental model of how WordPress works “behind the scenes” and be in a much better position to do development with it

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December 10, 2015 — BuddyPress is a powerful plugin that adds a social network to your site. But as users who haven’t used BuddyPress much or at all, we might not realize it’s power and flexiblity. This talk will introduce you to BuddyPress. Then it will show you how to start seeing the possiblities BuddyPress can offer and how to creatively intergrate it into sites you’re building for agencies, small businesses, enterprise clients, higher-education, and even your own personal projects. When we’re done, your mind will be filled with exciting new ideas of how to build better and cooler websites for your clients and yourself… all thanks to BuddyPress!

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December 10, 2015 — Mirroring WordPress data to Elasticsearch enables breaking some of the constraints that MySQL imposes on performance and relevancy. There is a high barrier to entry, but some strong benefits. I’ll survey the different use cases I’ve heard about, compare some plugins and libraries, and talk about the impact I’ve seen Elasticsearch have so far.

December 10, 2015 — Let unit testing save you from this nightmare. It’s a lot like coding with a safety net (or body armor if that’s how you roll). It lets you go a bit crazy while minimizing repercussions (as long as the police don’t show up).
Want to try something new? No worries! It’ll let you know if something isn’t working as it should. That’s how most paid plugins maintain a high level of quality over the years.

December 10, 2015 — Advanced Topics in WordPress Development

December 10, 2015 — You’ve got the basics of CSS down, but you are ready to kick it up a notch and add a bit more pizazz and interactivity to your websites. In this session we’ll explore the fundamentals of CSS transforms, transitions, and animation. What are the basic building blocks that make up these capabilities? What is the difference between a transition and a transform? What does browser support look like? Most importantly, how can you put these tools to use in your next project and where can you find good resources to learn more? We’ll answer these questions and more as we explore the basics of how to add some of the more truly dynamic elements of CSS to our websites.

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